Overlord
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€38.99
"Overlord" is the first major poetic epic in the English language since Milton's "Paradise Lost". Written in blank verse, with a panoramic visionary sweep that embraces higher and lower worlds within a universalist scheme, it is a contemporary epic poem in the tradition of Homer's "Iliad" and Virgil's "Aeneid". Drawing, as they do, on a single defining event for civilisation, it focuses on World War II and the American General Eisenhower's pursuit of Hitler and the fall of Berlin (our Troy); the battles and the suffering, and the hidden conflicts between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, Eisenhower and Montgomery, and Hitler and his generals. All are handled with a Homeric mastery that moves easily between formal diplomacy and bitter antagonism. Eisenhower's visions of Hell and Heaven evoke Dante's "Divine Comedy". In dealing with these powerful forces, still operating in our own time, "Overlord" makes sense of the 20th century and gives a new understanding of the present - in particular of the alternative New World Orders that face us.
Nicholas Hagger is a philosopher, cultural historian, man of letters, poet and former lecturer in the Middle East and Japan. His most recent books on history and current affairs are The Syndicate, The Secret History of the West, The Light of Civilization and the Endless Rise and Fall of Civilizations (due 2007) (all O Books).