Martin Boyd

Martin Boyd was one of the generation whose lives were changed by World War I. He served in a British regiment, survived the trenches in 1916–17 and joined the Royal Flying Corps. The pacifist beliefs which emerged from that war experience are central to his fiction, as they were to his life.

Boyd’s was a complex personality: witty, generous, sociable yet deeply reserved. He looked for his ‘home of the spirit’ in many places: an Anglican monastery, London’s West End clubland, a Cambridge village, and an old famly house in Harkaway, Victoria, and among English expatriates in Rome.

In a fine study of a man and his work, Brenda Niall re-creates the Melbourne in which Boyd grew up, just before World War I, and traces his development as a writer during his restless expatriate years.