This is probably the best book I've read on WW1 (along with "All quiet on the Western Front"). Weaving a tapestry of songs/doggerel, poetry and opinions from the famous (like Siegfried Sassoon, Rudyard Kipling and Apollonnaire), the infamous (like Adolf Hitler), the legendary (like Winston Chruchill), to the unknown (soldiers, captains and villagers), Peter Vansittart has done a wonderful job with this book.

Charting day by day, month by month, year by year, we (the readers) are invited to have a peek at the shifting kalaedioscope of the war, from the glorification, denunciation, and the propaganda, from the causes to the Armstice, and the ironic hedonism of the post-war era.

A must read book.

H. G. Wells is best known for "War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine", 2 groundbreaking, classic science fiction titles. But "Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul" is a heart-warming account of a young man suddenly thrown into a higher class and managing to eventually marry his childhood sweetheart and live out a dream.

I really enjoyed this book, and the main characters stayed with me, and the events became my own experiences. I can vividly remember sipping a cappucino when Kipps met Chitterlow. I remember the song playing on the radio when Kipps heard what Walshingham had done. And I remember the rain outside when it was clarified why the story had a narrator that was not involved in the story itself.

Yes, this is truly a 'feel-good' novel that will stay with me for a long time, and I recommend it to anyone who likes to just sit down and read, and meet likeable characters, without a lot of tech talk, gory action and confusing subplots. Don't pass this one up

Reading _Hermes in Paris_ is like looking at the stars through a telescope. They glitter, but are distant and ultimately, cold.

Set just before and during the beginning of the collapse of Napoleon III's empire, this book has tremendous potential for plot action. Which is unfulfilled, apparently as a conscious literary conceit. The author doesn't even tell readers what happened to the major characters, either the famous ones whose fate is recorded in history or others who are probably fictional. Well, he does give some (welcome) hints in the Afterword, but this is not the same as incorporating a real ending into the book. The characters fail to come to life or engage the reader's concern. The book's conceit is that the political collapse was engineered by Hermes, the trickster god, for no reason except amusement. Hermes truly does not care what happens to the human beings he manipulates. While this is probably meant as a comment on the randomness and unfairness of history, the viewpoint of an indifferent god too closely resembles the viewpoint of an indifferent author.

The prose does, as I said, glitter. So if you are willing to read a book mostly for the language, you might like _Hermes in Paris_.