The Missing of the Somme - Tapa blanda

'Head bowed, rifle on his back, a soldier is silhouetted against the going down of the sun, looking at the grave of a dead comrade, remembering him. A photograph from the war, is also a photograph of the way the war will be remembered. It is a photograph of the future, of the future's view of the past. We will remember them.' Relying more on personal impressions than systematic analysis, Geoff Dyer weaves a network of myth and memory that illuminates our own relation to the past.

Geoff Dyer is the author of Ways of Telling, a critical study of John Berger; the novels The Colour of Memory and The Search; and But Beautiful: A book about Jazz, which won the 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize and was shirtlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llwellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. He writes regularly for the Guardian and Observer, and is contributing editor of Esquire magazine.