The educationist, novelist, poet, critic and controversialist David Holbrook (1923–2011) was a twenty-one year old tank officer during the Allied invasion of German-occupied north-western Europe in the Second World War, and landed in France on D-Day, 6 June 1944. He fought on the Normandy battlefield for a fortnight before being wounded and evacuated. His 1966 novel Flesh wounds, described as ‘one of the few war novels that is conceived on the same plane as Wilfred Owen’s war poems’, is largely autobiographical. This exhibition marks the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, and celebrates the generous donation of Holbrook’s literary archive to the University Library by his family in 2012. We are grateful to the Estate of David Holbrook for permission to reproduce copyright material.

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