A Moment of War - Laurie Lee, Penguin Books Ltd

In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain, to narrowly escape execution by your own side, to kill a man with a borrowed rifle and feel nothing but shame. Moving and shrapnel-sharp, A Moment of War recalls the defeat of idealism, ‘that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck’.