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Books

'One warm night in June 1917 I became the man who nearly killed the Kaiser'

A review of Airborne: Scenes from the Life of Lance Sievking. Planes! Prison camps! Modernist radio! And much of it may be true

1 March 2014

9:00 AM

1 March 2014

9:00 AM

Airborne: Scenes from the Life of Lance Sieveking Paul Sieveking (ed., annotations)

Strange Attractor Press, pp.375, £25, ISBN: 97810907222269

The traditional story told about the first world war is that it changed everything: that it was the end of the old world and the beginning of the modern age, and that art and poetry could never be the same again. So it is refreshing to find, not far into Lance Sieveking’s amiable and haphazard memoirs, the claim that ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, but in 1919 I was a comparative rarity: a complete young man, a man with two arms, two legs, two lungs, two eyes.’

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