Martin Boyd was one of the generation whose lives were changed by World War I. He served in a British regiment, survived the trenches in 1916-17 and joined the Royal Flying Corps. The pacifist beliefs which emerged from that war experience are central to his fiction, as they were to his life. Boyd's was a complex personality: witty, generous, sociable yet deeply reserved. He looked for his 'home of the spirit' in many places: an Anglican monastery, London's West End clubland, a Cambridge village, and an old famly house in Harkaway, Victoria, and among English expatriates in Rome. In a fine study of a man and his work, Brenda Niall re-creates the Melbourne in which Boyd grew up, just before World War I, and traces his development as a writer during his restless expatriate years.
