Böcker av Ross Davies

Actor, memoirist, novelist, playwright and poet, Stephen Haggard was a highly individual figure in the English literature and theatre of the 1930s and Second World War. Haggard was born in Guatemala City in 1911, the son of a British colonial officer - who was a nephew of H. Rider Haggard - and his French-Canadian wife. He died in mysterious circumstances in 1943 while serving with British Army Intelligence in the Middle East.Ross Davies's biography retraces Stephen Haggard's brief yet vivid and crowded life and work. From a colonial childhood and education in England, the Haggard story moves on to prewar theatre studies in Munich, stardom on the London and New York stages and from there to service with the Army, the BBC, the Special Operations Executive and its rival Political Warfare Executive. Davies shows that Haggard felt verse to be his vital outlet, artistic and emotional, although he did not seek publication until the outbreak of Hitler's war. Wartime poems such "The Tear" and "Lotus" struck a chord with the many other young men and women who had to set aside civilian life, and Haggard's widow Morna collected the verse for publication with his memoir I'll Go to Bed at Noon (1944). In this book, Davies traces a fascinating life story that has been largely lost from view and makes a convincing case for Haggard's important contribution to the interwar literary and cultural scene.

"My name is Greyor, and I just remember violence..."After waking up in a hospital bed with no recollection of who he is, or how he got there, he knows whoever he was or whatever he did put him there. He will do anything from suffering the same fate, even if it means playing along with the lie he now lives. Greyor finds himself working for a company that are not who they say they are.Greyor begins the battle for his life and his memory. He knows that there was a life before this one, and that there will be a life after. He just needs to stay alive long enough to get there.

Dead man switch, a mind over madness, modern day odyssey about a man named Johnny Valentyne trying to pick up the pieces of a life he unknowingly left behind.Like picking up broken glass, he tries to rebuild the mirror that is his psyche before someone tries to kill him, again. Bleeding out, confused, and haunted by resurfacing memories, Johnny fights for his existence, identity, and answers no one seems to have.Pursued by a vicious mentor and a malevolent faction posing as an insurance company, benefiting from their clients' deaths, deaths he used to carry out. While on his last job, he goes rogue, because the person he was sent to kill, is the one person connecting him to the life he forgot.

In this, the first scholarly biography of Donald Hankey - the 'Student in Arms' of the first world war - Ross Davies recovers his life, from his birth into a banking and slave-owning dynasty in 1884 to his death at the Somme in 1916.