The People's Story (Official TV Tie-In)

The Great War

A Nation's Story

Accompanying an all-star ITV series, The Great War: The People's Story gives an incredibly personal perspective on the First World War, both at home and at the front, by vividly reconstructing the experiences of individuals through their diaries and letters.

A handful of people dominate this wonderful book. They are not special or famous but their stories will haunt you for a very long time... Charman's great achievement is to let the people who lived through all this speak for themselves. You will be torn between admiration, pity and anger.

This tome lets those who lived through these terrible times tell you how it really was in their own words. From the gung-ho to the fearful, the petty to the practical, the sorrows and the shocks, the pitiful, the heroic, the angry… they put it all down on paper in a way that lets you gauge whether you could have lived through the terror – and be in awe of those who did.

This is a deeply sobering, essential read.

Isobel Charman graduated from Bristol University in 2003 with a first-class degree and the George Hare Leonard prize in history. Since then she has worked in factual TV production in Berlin, Cornwall and London. She specialises in historical subjects, and has worked as a researcher, producer and director on award-winning films for TV and cinema. She did all the original research for The Great War: The People’s Story with support from the historians of Imperial War Museums, and from numerous librarians, archivists and families up and down the country. She also produced the series. This is her first book.

During the First World War three quarters of a million British people died – a figure so huge that it feels impossible to give it a human context. Consequently we struggle to truly grasp the impact this devastating conflict must have had on people's day-to-day lives. We resort to looking at the war from a distance, viewing its events in terms of their political or military significance. 
 
The Great War: The People's Story is different. Like the all-star ITV series it accompanies, it immerses the reader in the everyday experiences of real people who lived through the war. Using letters, diaries, and memoirs – many of which have never previously been published – Isobel Charman has painstakingly reconstructed the lives of people such as separated newly-weds Alan and Dorothy Lloyd, plucky enlisted factory-worker Reg Evans and proudly independent suffragist Kate Parry Frye. A century on, they here tell their stories in their own words, offering a uniquely personal account of the conflict. 
 
The Great War: The People's Story is both a meticulously researched piece of narrative history and a deeply moving remembrance of the extraordinary acts of extremely ordinary people.

Isobel Charman

The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo

The creation of a zoo in Dickensian London - when only one other existed across the world - is a story of jaw-dropping audacity. It is the story of trailblazing scientists, rival zookeepers and aristocratic naturalists collecting amazing animals from all four corners of the globe. 
 
It is the story of a weird and wonderful oasis in the heart of a swirling city, and of incredible characters, both human and animal - from Stamford Raffles and Charles Darwin to Jenny the orang-utan and Obaysch the celebrity hippo, the first that anyone in Britain had ever seen. 
 
Against a background of global Empire, domestic reform and industrialisation, this is a new history of a new world.

Isobel Charman

The Zoo

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