Alan Moorehead was a newspaper correspondent during the Second World War and is celebrated as a master of reportage. This is his narrative of the last years of the war, throughout which he was constantly at the heart of the conflict: from the Italian front, to exhorting D-Day troops with Montgomery, on the beach for De Gaulle's return to France, preceding the forces into Paris to find Hemingway and his militia having liberated the Ritz, to the surrender of German forces, country by country. Written in 1945, the book not only seeks to cut a crystal line of narrative through the huge mass of detail, but to capture with concision and acuity the states of mind of the occupied peoples as they were liberated. This edition of Eclipse is published with a new introduction by Phillip Knightley.