Brian Gardner author page

Brian Gardner biography

Brian Gardner was a British editor and historian whose journalism included roles as a feature writer for the Western Mail and the Sunday Express, a reporter at the Sunday Times, and a television critic for the Daily Sketch. His later work focused on historical subjects, particularly the literature and campaigns of the First World War and British imperial history.

Gardner’s books include The Big Push (1961), German East (1963), The Wasted Hour (1963), Allenby (1965), Mafeking (1966), The Quest for Timbuctoo (1968), The Lion’s Cage (1969), The African Dream (1970), The East India Company (1971; later edition 1990), and The Public Schools (1973). As an anthologist he compiled The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939–1945 and Churchill in His Time.

He is best known as editor of Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914–1918, first published by Methuen in London in 1964, with a foreword by Edmund Blunden.