{"product_id":"image-of-a-drawn-sword","title":"Image of a Drawn Sword","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe calm of Reynard Langrish’s quietly predictable life is shattered when, on a night of rain-swept storm, a stranger – a young soldier called Captain Archer - appears at his remote Kentish cottage. He takes Langrish to an ancient hill fort and introduces him to the men under his command, all of whom share a mysterious tattoo – two snakes entwined around a drawn sword – and are engaged in preparations to defend against a nameless menace, referred to only as ‘the Emergency’.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the dreamlike narrative rapidly accelerates into Kafkaesque nightmare, Langrish is drawn into a world where illusion, paranoia, and reality unite with lethal consequences, and disorienting shifts of time and perception culminate in a terrifying moment of pure horror.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally published in 1950, \u003ci\u003eThe Image of a Drawn Sword \u003c\/i\u003eis steeped in the themes and images that occupy much of Brooke’s writing – the relentlessness of time, suppressed homosexuality, condemned love, self-hatred, and futility; and, above all, an England that was both real and uniquely his own, a mystical, half-known natural world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘In its way not inferior to Kafka . . . [it has] a haunting, sinister quality’ – Anthony Powell\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘Seldom have naturalism and fantasy been more strangely merged’ – Elizabeth Bowen\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘He is subtle as the devil’ – John Betjeman\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘The skill and intensity of the writing made peculiarly haunting this cry of complaint on behalf of a bewildered Man’ – Pamela Hansford Johnson, \u003ci\u003eDaily Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Pan Macmillan","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54257665966424,"sku":"9781509855858","price":18.5,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9781509855858_f64e3f57-fc75-4176-a8c6-92d4858d4372.jpg?v=1768335334","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/image-of-a-drawn-sword","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}