Author, Edmund Blunden, is quoted throughout the book. Born at Tottenham Court Road in 1896, Blunden was the son of a London schoolmaster. They later moved to Kent, and Edmund eventually went on to attend Oxford. After the war, he taught literature at the University of Tokyo and in other places after World War II. Blunden died in Suffolk in 1974 at the age of seventy-seven. The author uses Blunden's work as examples for many of the points that he is trying to make.
The Great War and Modern Memory