Book after Book

1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War By Juliet Nicolson Published by John Murray After The Perfect Summer, Juliet Nicolson returns with a new and extraordinary book that delves deep into the emotions that dominated the lives of the British population after the Great War. Published at the end of 2009, The Great Silence focuses on the two years after the end of the hostilities and, as the author writes in her introduction, it is “a book about silence, the silence that followed the ‘incessant thunder’ of the four years and four months of the First World War.” Guns fell silent on 11th November 1918. People stood still and observed a two-minute silence on 11th November 1919, “to commemorate the Great War” and “to remember the Glorious Dead and their Great Sacrifice.”. On 11th November 1920 the Unknown Soldier was then lowered beneath Westminster Abbey shrouded in silence and “invested with the millions of identities that the bereaved willed upon him.” The country was not silent o...