The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: Left Wings Over Europe

The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis brings together for the first time all of the published writings of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), a major contributor to literary modernism and one of the most important British painters of the first half of the twentieth century. Composed hastily and with little foresight as to its potential consequences, Left Wings Over Europe: or How to Make a War about Nothing was published in 1936. The book is one of three works of political invective written by Wyndham Lewis against the international order of the western powers, the Soviet Union, and sympathetic towards the fascist regimes in Italy and Nazi Germany. Lewis's interest in political writing emerged in the aftermath of the First World War, where he had served as an artillery officer and official war artist. Motivated by this experience all of his subsequent non-fictional works were in some sense 'anti-war', and Left Wings is no exception. Though replete with a range of mercurial analysis and somewhat agitated in tone, this work and the related essays and articles preceding it collected together for the first time, provide a highly subjective yet fascinating contemporary account of the day-to-day diplomatic crises and political struggles that defined Europe in the mid-1930s.