Other Men’s Flowers

Category Poetry
Format PB
Imprint
Price 295

ISBN: 978-81-291-1928-5
Pages: 552 pages
Date: August 2012

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Other Men’s Flowers is the famous anthology of Lord Wavell’s favourite poems. The
anthology features some of the most memorable poems by the greatest poets of
the English canon including Shakespeare, Milton, Kipling, Browning, Coleridge
and Yeats among others.
To this memorial edition of a famous anthology, Lord Wavell’s son has written a
preface explaining how the book came into being and what pleasure its reception
gave to the compiler: ‘He never tried to conceal his evident surprise and delight
at the success of the book. It brought him into association with writers whose
work he had long enjoyed but whom he had never expected to know as friends.
It also brought letters from all sorts and conditions of men in many lands who
might not otherwise have addressed a Field Marshal.’
Since it was first published in 1944, the anthology has never been out of print.
Enhanced by Wavell’s own introduction and annotations, Other Men’s Flowers has
encouraged and delighted many thousands of readers over the years.

AUTHOR OF THE BOOK

Field-Marshal Lord Wavell (1883-1950), educated at Winchester College and
Sandhurst, was a professional soldier. He became known as an officer undeterred
by convention and as an exceptional trainer of troops. In 1939 he was given the
Middle East Command. His defeat of a numerically superior Italian army, with the
capture of 130,000 prisoners, was as remarkable as his skillful conquest of Abyssinia.
He was Viceroy of India from 1943 to 1947, and in the last years of his life in
London he became President of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Kipling,
Browning, Poetry, and Virgil Societies.
As TS Eliot wrote some years after his death, “I do not pretend to be a judge of
Wavell as a soldier … What I do know from personal acquaintance with the man,
is that he was a great man. This is not a term I use easily …”