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Forgotten Voices Of The Great War

Forgotten Voices Of The Great War

In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began a momentous and important task. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing WWI veterans and interviewing them at length in order to record the experiences of ordinary individuals in war. The IWM aural archive has become the most important archive of its kind in the world. Authors have occasionally been granted access to the vaults, but digesting the thousands of hours of footage is a monumental task.

Now, forty years on, the Imperial War Museum has at last given author Max Arthur and his team of researchers unlimited access to the complete WWI tapes. These are the forgotten voices of an entire generation of survivors of the Great War. The resulting book is an important and compelling history of WWI in the words of those who experienced it.

Reviews

  • "An extraordinary and immensely moving book"

    Stephen Fry

  • "This extraordinary book is crammed with details, conjuring up the atmosphere of war as vividly as the frequent descriptions of appalling violence"

    Daily Telegraph

  • "The words of the soldiers are as fresh as if they were written yesterday ... extraordinary"

    Deborah Moggach, Mail on Sunday

  • "These stories are so harrowing, and their witness so precise and devastating"

    Andrew Motion, The Times

  • "The stories of these now long-dead vets simply jump off the page"

    FHM

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About the Author

Max Arthur

Max Arthur is a lifetime supporter of Manchester United. He is this country's leading oral historian and the author of the classic work, Forgotten Voices of the Great War. His most recent book, Last Post: The Final Words from our First World War Soldiers was the biggest selling history book of 2006.

Max Arthur

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