The Book Chain

Poets of the First World WarBrooke died in 1915 believing in the cause. Sassoon survived the trenches and turned against the way the war was run.

FaberFaber published Sassoon from 1928, and T. S. Eliot was one of the firm’s directors.

Faber againIt was Eliot, at Faber, who took on Ted Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, in 1957.

The Rattle BagHughes and Heaney were friends who edited two poetry anthologies together, The Rattle Bag and The School Bag.

The DanesBeowulf sails to help Hrothgar, king of the Danes. In Cornwell’s England, the Danes are the enemy.

The making of EnglandThe England that Alfred’s heirs built was written down, village by village, in the Domesday survey of 1086.

England, field by fieldDomesday surveyed the land for a king. Cobbett rode across it in the 1820s and wrote down what he saw.

On the roadFrom Cobbett on horseback to Laurie Lee on foot, setting out from Gloucestershire one summer morning in 1934.

AndalucíaLee was on the Andalusian coast when the Spanish Civil War broke out. Irving had lived in the Alhambra itself in 1829.

Spain, seen from abroadAn American wrote Tales of the Alhambra; a Frenchman, Le Sage, sent his hero Gil Blas wandering across Spain.

Rogues’ talesGil Blas and Moll Flanders both tell their own lives of scrapes and schemes, in the first person.

Daniel DefoeDefoe wrote both. Robinson Crusoe came first, in 1719.

CastawaysBallantyne’s three boys are shipwrecked on an island, as Crusoe was before them.

IslandsFrom a Pacific island to Wild Cat Island in the Lakes, where the Swallows make their camp.

Another islandGeorge’s own Kirrin Island, in the first Famous Five book of 1942.