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The Good Soldier
Gary Mead

The Good Soldier

Posterity has not been kind to Douglas Haig, Commander of the British Army on the Western Front for much of the First World War. He was caricatured in Oh What A Lovely War! as a greedy and ruthless manipulator, selling tickets to the war then looking on from safety behind the lines. In Blackadder Goes Forth, he was satirised as General 'Insanity' Haig, merrily flicking toy soldiers into a bin as he constructed his battle plans. However, as Gary Mead's biography shows, in his own day Haig was a hero, who won the war. In this definitive account, Gary Mead combines insight and even-handedness to offer what is long overdue: a considered, compelling and comprehensive portrait of Britain's most controversial military leader.

Book Details:

  • Author: Gary Mead
  • On Submission
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    • UK: Atlantic
Gary Mead

Gary Mead

A graduate of the University of Newcastle on Tyne, Gary Mead started his journalistic career by reporting on the rise of Solidarity and the imposition of martial law in Poland for New Statesman, The Observer and various other publications. He then joined the BBC World Service as a writer on East Europe. Subsequently he moved to Granada TV and spent a year in South Africa making a documentary history of apartheid. He then joined the Financial Times, initially as the paper’s correspondent in Argentina. He was head of research for the World Gold Council and spent time in Washington D.C.&...
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Book Reviews

  • "The best and fairest biography of Haig that I have read…well-written, admirable biography."
    Daily Telegraph
  • "Haig has found at last the biography he deserves."
    Times
  • "The most successful attempt yet at disentangling the historical Douglas Haig from the twin excesses of Haigiography and donkeydom."
    Times Literary Supplement
  • "Gary Mead has made an important contribution with his admirably lucid and balanced book...The Good Soldier is the first proper biography of this most controversial of figures."
    Hew Strachan
  • "Mead's Haig is not a marble statue, nor a caricature butcher and bungler, but a man of very human strengths and weaknesses."
    Times Literary Supplement