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.

Brilliant ... imaginative ... he has come closer to the soldier than any other correspondent -- V. S. Pritchett
Altogether a magnificent book * Observer *
Moorehead is easily the first of all war correspondents * Listener *
There is something of genius in the breadth and the penetration of his vision which encompasses the whole panorama of war and then narrows it down to the particular * New Statesman *

Alan Moorhead's writing on war showed him to be 'more than a first-class reporter. He is an artist' (Observer). After 1945, he turned to writing books, including Eclipse, Gallipoli (for which he won the Duff Cooper Prize), The White Nile, The Blue Nile and finally A Late Education. He was awarded an OBE in 1946 and died in 1983.