'Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war, is also a photograph of the way the war will be remembered. It is a photograph of the future, of the future's view of the past. We will remember them' Relying more on personal impressions than systematic analysis, Geoff Dyer weaves a network of myth and memory that illuminates our own relation to the past.Insights into the monuments, films, graveyards and poems that the Great War left behind - a moving, intriguing and illuminating de-coding.Geoff Dyer is the author of WAYS OF TELLING, a critical study of John Berger; the novels THE COLOUR OF MEMORY and THE SEARCH; and BUT BEAUTIFUL: a book about Jazz, which won the 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize and was shirtlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llwellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. He writes regularly for the GUARDIAN and OBSERVER, and is contributing editor of ESQUIRE magazine.Reissued at the same time as Canongate reissue the rest of Geoff's backlist. With a fantastic and striking new cover. '[Dyer] is excellent on the different ambitions and effects of municipal memorials, an on photographs and paintings-the book is secured by his sensitivity to nuance, the range of his reading, and his willingness to contemplate something for as long it takes to understand it' Sebastian Faulks, MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Articulates a response to the Great War which everybody feels but nobody has analysed so scrupulously' SPECTATOR'An original, highly personal, meditation upon war and remembrance weaving a network of myth and memory, photos and films, poetry and sculptures, graveyards and ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War . Brilliant . the great Great War book of our time' OBSERVER Brand NEW unread book.