The Guards

by John de St. Jorre, Anthony Edgeworth (Photographer)

"The Guards, a body of some 5500 officers and men whose special task it is to protect the British sovereign are the oldest and perhaps the most unusual military instititution in the West. They are not just gorgeously caparisoned performers marching up and down outside the royal palaces in London and Windsor...they are also a highly disciplined and versatile military formation, found wherever the British army is called upon to soldier, from the jungles of Central America to the mean streets of Belfast." Many color photographs.

255 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 1981

About the author

John de St. Jorre was born in London and educated in Britain and Singapore. "I spent two years in the army, much of it in Malaya during the Communist insurgency, followed by a degree at Oxford. During my last year at Oxford, I was recruited into MI6 by my medieval-history tutor. [By age 24] I had quit MI6 – I had spent most of my time working in Africa – and begun to drift doing odd jobs to survive but enjoying the freedom of the era. It was, after all, the 1960s and it seemed the right thing to do. ...after freelancing in central Africa, the Observer hired me. I was deflected by covering political crises in Africa and the Middle East, and wars, notably the Nigerian-Biafran conflict, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and the Iranian Islamic revolution."
Turning freelance in New York, he divided his time between journalism, book writing, lecturing, and writing and editing. He has written articles and reviews for The New York Times and its Sunday Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, Town and Country, The Times, The Guardian, Punch, The Literary Review, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, and Departures among others.

He lives with his wife and family in Newport, Rhode Island.

Reviews

[colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

read 05.30.84