TRIAL BY BATTLE

First edition of this revised edition with a new preface by Frank Kermode. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by Kenneth Farnhill. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. In the clean dustwrapper, with a small nick to the upper edge of the front panel and the merest rubbing to edges. Not price-clipped (21s. net to the front flap). A very nice copy.

David Piper (1918-1990), better known as former director of the National Portrait Gallery (1964-67), the Fitzwilliam Museum (1967-73), and the Ashmolean (1973-85) also published a handful of novels under the pseudonym, David Towry (his middle name). 'Trial By Battle', first published in 1959, the most personal of the author's writings, draws on his wartime experiences, and in particular the battle at the time of the British withdrawal from Malaya and three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. The novel, as Frank Kermode writes in the preface to this new edition, is more than a "conventional documentary war novel, [...] achieve[ing] more in the way of communicating the clash of terror and discipline, the shock of shooting and being shot at, than many enormous and overtly more ambitious novels. [...] For all its unemphatic manner it is probably the best English novel to come out of the Second World War".