Great and the good

CONTEMPORARY letters, diaries and memoirs are the basis of this excellent book, which vividly portrays the pain suffered by countless British people at home and in the Forces, during the First World War.

The book accompanies the major ITV series, which reaches episode three on Sunday.

The material for this book was uncovered by the author, television producer Isobel Charman, while she was doing research for the series. In these pages, she follows the wartime and post-war fortunes of a handful of men and women.

We get to know them so well, they become like personal friends.

Although there are war deaths, it is a relief to find in the final chapter that a number lived on for many years into the unsettled and greatly changed post-war world. The group covers the social spectrum. Its survivors include factory worker Reg Evans whose face was horribly disfigured in battle, but lived on to marry in 1924 and produce children, and socialite Duff Cooper, who served on the Western Front, and who finally married his long-term love, the beautiful Lady Diana Manners, in 1919. We get a fascinating picture of life on the home front, where food shortages and industrial and political problems developed.

The Greatest Escape: How One French Community Saved Thousands Of Lives From The Nazis by Peter Grose (Nicholas Brealey Publishing £16.99, ebook £4.29)

DURING the Second World War, the villagers of the remote Vivarais- Lignon plateau in southern France pulled off an astonishing feat. In defiance of the Vichy government and the Nazis, and at great risk to themselves, the people of the plateau saved the lives of 5,000 men, women and children, 3,500 of them Jews, by hiding them, supplying them with false papers or helping them to escape to neutral Switzerland. This is a captivating and little-known story, but it could have been more powerfully told.

The exceptional courage and bravery of the villagers should be central to the book, but the focus sometimes drifts away from the actual escape and becomes merely a biography of the region rather than the people.

Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts by James Anderson Winn (OUP £30) 3/5 stars

THINK of Queen Anne and you think of furniture and Queen Anne legs, for in the eyes of most people she was one of Britain’s least distinguished monarchs. But now she has found a champion to stand up for her and put the record straight.

Her early upbringing included mastering dancing, singing, acting, drawing and instrumental music (she played the guitar and harpsichord), drama and literature featured strongly in her education and led to her becoming a patroness of the arts without parallel. She was a truly Royal culture vulture and it was no coincidence that her reign saw the flourishing of such talents as Pope, Addison, Swift, Defoe and Handel.

Eighteen pregnancies produced only one child and he died at the age of 11. She may have been a sorely troubled soul, but she still had a warm and generous heart.

Is the Vicar in Pet? by Barbara Fox (Sphere £7.99) 4/5 stars 

PLENTY of people have written about the pleasure of living in the Yorkshire Dales, but does life in a Northumberland pit village come up to scratch. It certainly did for nine-year-old Barbara Fox when her father became vicar at Ashington. There was a charm to be enjoyed among the terraced houses and the smoking chimneys and even the ponging pit heaps could not destroy the feeling that Barbara had arrived in Paradise.

This was a community that wore its heart on its sleeve; the vicarage and its garden were a perfect playground. If only all memories were made of this.