On The Brink

The First World War was the disaster which broke the European order of the century since Napoleon and brought in its wake all the catastrophes which followed. Lucy Beckett explores the lives and work of some great European writers born in the years between 1900 and 1914, too young to fight in the war but marked by the loss of an irrecoverable childhood world. In half a dozen languages, they produced an extraordinary range of masterpieces. Examples are: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Czeslaw Milosz, Samuel Beckett, Georges Simenon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Valery Grossman, Albert Camus. It is a sign of their times that none of these writers died in the country in which he was born.