Description: ‘Past and Present’ by EdwardGreenwood is a compulsively written and utterly readable account of the life ofa teacher and writer who is now in his ninth decade. The very first person whoread the book told Edward it was so intriguing he could not put it down and thefounder and head of The Conrad Press, which is now publishing the book, had thesame experience when he read it. As Edward says: ‘I have nine decades to look back onand throughout almost all that time I’ve been passionately interested in peopleand in history and in literature and in many other things. I think I have astory to tell.’‘Past and Present’ is indeed a riveting read,full of a delight and appreciation of life and written so vividly that youreally do feel Edward is immersing you in all his life’s experiences. Hedescribes his remarkable family, his beautiful mother, his admired brotherBobby who was a flier killed in the Second World War, and his gifted eldersister Edith who knew German and visited Germany in the fraught year 1933 whenHitler took power. Edward also writes about his boarding schooleducation, his life at Oxford University and his work as a factory inspectorand library cataloguer at the University of Keele. He also writes about hislong marriage to his beloved wife Barbara with great vividness and greatemotion, which he also brings to the suicide of his younger son Edward and his,Edward’s, experience of falling in love with a beautiful young Romanian womanwhen he was in his eighties and then slowly having to face the unpleasantreality that he had been the victim of a honey trap.