The People's Story (Official TV Tie-In)

The Great War

A Nation's Story

Accompanying an all-star ITV series, The Great War: The People's Story gives an incredibly personal perspective on the First World War, both at home and at the front, by vividly reconstructing the experiences of individuals through their diaries and letters.

A handful of people dominate this wonderful book. They are not special or famous but their stories will haunt you for a very long time... Charman's great achievement is to let the people who lived through all this speak for themselves. You will be torn between admiration, pity and anger.

This tome lets those who lived through these terrible times tell you how it really was in their own words. From the gung-ho to the fearful, the petty to the practical, the sorrows and the shocks, the pitiful, the heroic, the angry… they put it all down on paper in a way that lets you gauge whether you could have lived through the terror – and be in awe of those who did.

This is a deeply sobering, essential read.

Isobel Charman graduated from Bristol University in 2003 with a first-class degree and the George Hare Leonard prize in history. Since then she has worked in factual TV production in Berlin, Cornwall and London. She specialises in historical subjects, and has worked as a researcher, producer and director on award-winning films for TV and cinema. She did all the original research for The Great War: The People’s Story with support from the historians of Imperial War Museums, and from numerous librarians, archivists and families up and down the country. She also produced the series. This is her first book.

During the First World War three quarters of a million British people died – a figure so huge that it feels impossible to give it a human context. Consequently we struggle to truly grasp the impact this devastating conflict must have had on people's day-to-day lives. We resort to looking at the war from a distance, viewing its events in terms of their political or military significance. 
 
The Great War: The People's Story is different. Like the all-star ITV series it accompanies, it immerses the reader in the everyday experiences of real people who lived through the war. Using letters, diaries, and memoirs – many of which have never previously been published – Isobel Charman has painstakingly reconstructed the lives of people such as separated newly-weds Alan and Dorothy Lloyd, plucky enlisted factory-worker Reg Evans and proudly independent suffragist Kate Parry Frye. A century on, they here tell their stories in their own words, offering a uniquely personal account of the conflict. 
 
The Great War: The People's Story is both a meticulously researched piece of narrative history and a deeply moving remembrance of the extraordinary acts of extremely ordinary people.

Isobel Charman

Vivid, entertaining and scrupulously researched

Fascinating ... nostalgia, social and natural history and the ongoing need to change

What an incredible story ... a charming and lovely read ... a striking tale of discovery for the people involved and also for us ... you can give this book to anyone

[A] vivid novelistic retelling . . . An impressive work of imagination and research, as well as a pleasure to read

A rich, imaginative and original history, written with a film-maker's eye for detail, and starring a remarkable cast of characters. Short of asking the animals themselves, it's hard to think how this might be bettered

Dr Richard Barnett, author of 'Medical London'

Terrific. Charman flings open the doors of a cabinet stuffed with zoological and human curios, blows off the dust of a couple of centuries, and talks us expertly and entrancingly through each exhibit

Charles Foster, author of 'Being a Beast'

Delightful . . . Charman takes the story out of the cages and onto the smoggy, sometimes riotous streets of Victorian London, up and down the country and beyond its shores

As I always tell my students, if you wish to understand science you need to understand the people involved in its development.  Whilst the animals in a zoo are rightfully the stars of the show - their supporting human cast is no less fascinating and it is this that Isobel Charman has so wonderfully captured in her book.

Prof. Robert J. Young, Chair in Wildlife Conservation, University of Salford

She succeeds in personalising the story, bringing to life this extraordinary episode in humankind's search for a better understanding of the natural world

The book's structure and style is that of a historical novel or Victorian melodrama...it would all make a wonderful seven-part historical costume drama

Charman possesses a proper historian's nose for a story and this is a good one

Charming ... provides a fascinating Zoo's Who of the Victorian naturalists and wildlife enthusiasts who established a 'Noah's Ark' in the heart of the rackety capital

Charman crafts an affecting narrative of the first 25 years of the Zoological Society of London . . . The book is nuanced, often entertaining, and also tragic

[A] sprightly tale of the London Zoo from its conception in 1824 to the death of its longtime president in 1851. As The Zoo engagingly shows us, caring for and observing caged beasts transformed our view of animals-and of ourselves

The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo

The creation of a zoo in Dickensian London - when only one other existed across the world - is a story of jaw-dropping audacity. It is the story of trailblazing scientists, rival zookeepers and aristocratic naturalists collecting amazing animals from all four corners of the globe. 
 
It is the story of a weird and wonderful oasis in the heart of a swirling city, and of incredible characters, both human and animal - from Stamford Raffles and Charles Darwin to Jenny the orang-utan and Obaysch the celebrity hippo, the first that anyone in Britain had ever seen. 
 
Against a background of global Empire, domestic reform and industrialisation, this is a new history of a new world.

Isobel Charman

Praise for The Zoo

Vivid, entertaining and scrupulously researched

Fascinating ... nostalgia, social and natural history and the ongoing need to change

What an incredible story ... a charming and lovely read ... a striking tale of discovery for the people involved and also for us ... you can give this book to anyone

Vivid, entertaining and scrupulously researched

Fascinating ... nostalgia, social and natural history and the ongoing need to change

What an incredible story ... a charming and lovely read ... a striking tale of discovery for the people involved and also for us ... you can give this book to anyone

Vivid, entertaining and scrupulously researched

Fascinating ... nostalgia, social and natural history and the ongoing need to change

What an incredible story ... a charming and lovely read ... a striking tale of discovery for the people involved and also for us ... you can give this book to anyone

Books by Isobel Charman

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