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Penguin is donating a copy of Jeremy Paxman’s history of the First World War to every secondary school in the UK to mark the centenary of Britain’s declaration of war.
The publisher will send a complimentary copy of Great Britain’s Great War, first published in hardback in October 2013, to the head of history in nearly 5,000 schools. It is hoped that the initiative will help students to understand what life was really like for British people during the First World War and how the country was transformed by it, beyond the well-known images, poetry and commemorative rituals.
Paxman said: “It’s important that we remember the range of experiences that Britons went through during the First World War, and the enormous debt that we owe them. There is an opportunity for students to understand the war as relevant history through these experiences, but teachers aren’t helped by an over-reliance on the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.”
He added: “Poetry fails to answer the really interesting questions by glorifying the suffering of soldiers in the trenches. The big question is why Owen, after writing his anti-war poetry, and Sassoon, after his letter of protest against the war, decided to go back and fight? We need to see the full picture to understand why this war was the defining event in modern British history.”
Great Britain’s Great War uses first-hand source material from nurses, soldiers, politicians, factory workers and children to explain why we fought the war so willingly, and how we endured it so long. The book was the subject of a four-part BBC TV series presented by Paxman in early 2014. It was published in paperback earlier this month (July 2014) and has sold 40,804 copies through Nielsen BookScan across all formats.