Private Angelo
Eric Linklater
Available as eBook
Introduced by Magnus Linklater
Angelo, a private in Mussolini’s ‘ever-glorious’ Italian army, may possess the virtues of love and an engaging innocence but he lacks the gift of courage. However, due to circumstances beyond his control, he ends up fighting not only for Italy but also for the British and German armies.
With his patron the Count, the beautiful Lucrezia, the charming Annunziata, and the delightful Major Telfer, Angelo’s fellow characters are drawn with humour, insight and sympathy, making the book a wittily satirical comment on the grossness and waste of war.
Eric Linklater, who served with the Black Watch in Italy in World War II, is one of Scotland’s most distinguished writers. In Private Angelo he has written a book which demonstrates that honour is not solely the preserve of the brave.
“He writes not only of an angel, but like one … Private Angelo is now a permanent portrait in the heavenly gallery of human futility.”
the Observer
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“The drollest medley of muddle and misadventure … A quite unforgettable group of people take part, none of whom lacks the genuine Linklater stamp … A high-spirited entertainment which never loses its individual air.”
sunday Times
Eric Linklater
Eric Linklater (1899-1974) was born in Wales and educated in Aberdeen. His family came from the Orkney Islands (his father was a master mariner), and the boy spent much of his childhood there.
Linklater served as a private in the Black Watch at the close of WWI, surviving a nearly fatal head wound to return to Aberdeen to take a degree in English. A spell in Bombay with the Times of India was followed by some university teaching in Aberdeen again, and then a Commonwealth Fellowship which allowed him to travel in America from 1928 to 1930.
Linklater’s memories of Orkney and student life informed his first novel, White Maa’s Saga (1929), while the success of Poet’s Pub in the same year led him to take up writing as a full-time career. A hilarious satirical novel, Juan in America (1931), followed his American trip, while the equally irreverent Magnus Merrimen (1934) was based on his experience as a Nationalist candidate for a by-election in East Fife.
Linklater joined the Army once again in WWII, to serve in fortress Orkney, and later as a War Office correspondent reporting the Italian campaign, going on to write the official history. The compassionate comedy of Private Angelo (1946) was drawn from his Italian experience.
With these and many other books, stories and plays to his name, Linklater enjoyed a long and popular career as a writer. His early creative years were described in The Man on my Back (1941), while a fuller autobiography, Fanfare for a Tin Hat, appeared in 1970.