Fire of Life

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

Henry Woodd Nevinson (1856-1941) was a scholar and socialist who found his m�tier on the cusp of the twentieth century, as a war correspondent who would go on to chronicle the major wars and civil conflicts of his time, from South Africa and Russia to India and the Balkans. Reporting from the Western Front in 1918 he was wounded at the Dardanelles. Nevinson's work was marked by a strong sense of conscience and underscored by activism: directing relief work in Macedonia and Albania, campaigning against the dreadful mistreatment of bonded labourers in Portuguese Angola, and supporting female suffrage in Britain. (He would marry the suffragette Evelyn Sharp.)

Nevinson wrote three volumes of autobiography: Changes and Chances (1923), More Changes, More Chances (1925), and Last Changes, Last Chances (1928). Fire of Life, first published in 1935, is an expert abridgement of this trilogy.

450 pages, Paperback

First published February 21, 2013

About the author

Henry Woodd Nevinson was an English war correspondent during the Second Boer War and World War I, a campaigning journalist exposing slavery in western Africa, political commentator and suffragist.

Nevinson studied at Shrewsbury School and later at Christ Church, Oxford. At Oxford, he came under the influence of John Ruskin's ideas. He worked as a missionary at Toynbee Hall in London's East End. After this he spent some time in Jena studying German culture. The result of this was in 1884 Nevinson published his first book, Herder and his Times, one of the first studies of Johann Gottfried Herder in English. In the 1880s Nevinson became a socialist; he befriended Peter Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter, and in 1889 joined the Social Democratic Federation.