Mapping The Past : A Search For Five Brothers At The Edge Of Empire

Charles Drazin

ISBN 10: 0434012181 / ISBN 13: 9780434012183

Published by William Heinemann, London, 2016

About this Item

1st Impression, unread, not price clipped, no owner's name or other inscription, D/j has mild shelf wear at head and foot of front cover plus D/j spine but the D/j has no tears, nicks or marks and is now protected by a clear removable sleeve.

Seller Inventory # 047848

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Mapping The Past : A Search For Five Brothers At The Edge Of Empire
• Publisher: William Heinemann, London
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0434012181
• ISBN 13: 9780434012183
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

`Patsy, what are you going to be when you grow up? Well?’ 'A Royal Engineer, Daddy. A Royal Engineer!’ Charles Drazin knew little about his mother's father – only that he had been a military surveyor who mapped great swathes of the British Empire. But when his mother was told that she was dying, it prompted recollections of her early life that she had never confided before: of the village in the west of Ireland where she had grown up, and of her father, whose death changed the life of an eight-year-old girl for ever. Soon afterwards her own death left her son to go through alone the relics of her life. They included a box of old photographs, a battered suitcase stamped with the initials of the grandfather he had never known, and the service records of Patrick’s brothers, who, like him, had all enlisted in the Royal Engineers as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. So began an extraordinary journey of discovery that took him from the age of Queen Victoria to the battlefields of the Western Front. Mapping the Past is the story of five brothers who, mapping the world, lived up to the Royal Engineers’ motto of Everywhere. It is the story of Ireland, and of the Empire from which it broke away. It is the story of conflict, war and its aftermath. And, most of all, it is the story of memory, endlessly carrying the past, for better or worse, into our present and future. It is an imaginative, intimate and powerful work of history, by a writer of rare power.

About the Author

Charles Drazin was born in Hampshire in 1960. He grew up in North London and was educated at Highgate School and Oxford University, where he read Classics. He has worked for many years as a writer and editor, and also teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. His other books include In Search of the Third Man (1999), Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul (2002), The Man Who Outshone the Sun King (2008) and The Faber Book of French Cinema (2011).