A young soldier’s noble vision: creating the Western Front Way 

This profound and emotion-laden book ends, as did the first world war, in hope, and no little catharsis. It begins, though, in overpowering grief, not just that of the Western Front’s bereaved, but the author’s. In 2016 Sir Anthony Seldon’s wife died of cancer, diagnosed five years earlier. They had met at Oxford, she was ‘dark-eyed and beautiful, preternaturally clever and knowing’, and when they married, his father, whose own people had been refugees from the pogroms in Ukraine, was delighted that he’d found a Jewish girl. After her death, which ‘ripped me in two’, writes Seldon, he threw himself into his work – his prodigious writing and the vice-chancellorship of Buckingham University, which his father had helped found. It was no remedy, however, and in 2020 he left, including the tied cottage. For the first time in most of his adult life he found himself without a wife, job or home.