A FOX UNDER MY CLOAK. By Henry Williamson.

1955 1st edition. 8vo (138 x 202mm). Pp415. Not illustrated. Tan cloth, spine titled in red. 15/- net.

The fifth, and scarcest, volume in Henry Williamson's fifteen volume series of semi-autobiographical novels, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. The central character, Phillip Maddison, is loosely based on Williamson himself. The dust-wrapper design for this, and all other titles in the series, was designed by James Broom-Lynne (1916-1963). In this volume we follow Phillip Maddison "...into the Great War, surviving in the face of terror, from the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 to the gas attacks of the Battle of Loos the following year. While home in England on sick leave Phillip obtains his commission into a fashionable regiment in which his social inadequacies make him the butt of his fellow officers' scorn. Yet, alone among them, Phillip has tasted the bleak reality of life, and death, on the Western Front." "Williamson's style is romantic, though rarely sentimental, and his sensuous response to nature is fresh and surprising." (Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939). Six thousand copies of this first edition were printed (Matthews, 145) and it has since become quite hard-to-find.