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to his downfall in 1916, as both Britain and Germany escalated the
conflict instead of ending it. The diary of Secretary of State Lewis Har-
court contains forbidden records of Cabinet discussions, as well as
character sketches of some of the leading players, including Winston
Churchill. Harold Macmillan, who would become Prime Minister long
after his experience as an officer in the trenches, wrote le ers from the
Somme recording, inter alia, his speculations about the nature of mod-
ern warfare and his considerations on death in ba le. While the rector
of Great Leighs in Essex kept a diary of events occurring in his village
during wartime, T.E. Lawrence was corresponding from the Middle
East before becoming involved in the incipient Arab Revolt.
It is of particular interest to be able to sidestep our historical
minds as we read through the documents in this collection and “see
the war through the eyes of those engaged in it, and imagine how it
must have seemed to them without any knowledge of what was to
come.”

Postcards from The Trenches: images of the First World War is a collection
that affords an entirely visual representation of life in the trenches dur-
ing the Great War. Together with Postcards from The Russian Revolution,
the volume inaugurates a series printed for the Bodleian Library and
titled “Postards from…”. Each volume in the series draws on the col-
lection of postcards assembled by John Fraser over sixty years and do-
nated to the Bodleian Library, presenting around 50 postcards, with
an image from the front of the postcard printed on the right-hand page
and the verso of the card on the facing left-hand page of the book, to-
gether with a caption explaining the card. The postcards in this vol-
ume were originally printed from photographs taken by soldiers as
well as embedded journalists in France, Belgium, Austria, Germany,
and Britain, and also range widely in tone, from detached irony to
crude realism, capturing the boredom, the diversions, the sullenness,
and the horrors of life in the trenches. The collection was compiled,
and comes with an introduction, by historian and journalist Andrew
Roberts, also known for his debatable views on current practices of
torture in the name of the “defence of liberty.” While the book has
been commended as a “fascinating and unprecedented historical doc-
ument” and each individual image provides grounds for such assess-

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