Rex W Last

Rex W Last has written a dozen books on modern German literature (Erich Remarque, Hans Arp, and Dadaist literature) and translated amongst others Willy Brandt’s wartime memoires, a biography of Bertha von Suttner, the famous anti-war campaigner and authoress of Lay Down Your Arms, and an account of the life and time in office of West German President Gustav Heinemann. He has edited many more books and series.

Recently he has take up fiction writing and has three novels in print: Cursing the Darkness, Wolfgang's Castle and Operation Seagull. All are concerned with the question: if you are living under an intolerable regime, here the Nazi party, how do you attempt to make changes, however small, to their intrinsic nastiness without yourself paying a painful penalty?

He has also written books on a variety of computing topics, including MS-DOS and artificial intelligence. He was editor of Amstrad PCW Magazine for many years (later rebranded as PCW User) and has written hundreds of articles for this and other computing magazines. As a pioneer of computer-assisted language learning, he designed a number of programming packages for the education market.

In the 1960s, he became editorial director of Oswald Wolff Publishers, and was MD of two independent local history and academic publishing companies, the Hutton Press and LocheeSoft.

Now retired as a Professor Emeritus but still writing and programming, he has turned to eBooks for the Kindle to reach a wider audience. The Making Sense of series, which first appeared under the Hutton Press imprint, is currently being rewritten and republished for the Kindle.

Some years ago, his wife was diagnosed with Parkinson's, which segued later into dementia. He was her carer for over a decade, and that experience resulted in three books campaigning for the rights of the 'informal' carer, the latest of which has just appeared: The Informal Dementia Carer - who cares?