Red cloth binding with sil;ver title on the spine and the front board.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Roger: A code word for a gas cylinder and a nickname for rum. Sausage: An observation balloon. Whippet: A small, light type of tank with a top speed of eight m.p.h. The First World War raged for four years, taking with it hundreds of thousands of young soldiers who lived and died together, bonded by the horror of the war. Now, all the way from the trenches and through the letters of Christopher Moore’s Captain Cartwright, comes an extraordinary lexicon of the phrases and lingo of life at the front. Whether born from the desperation of gallows humour (‘If it keeps on like this, someone’s going to get hurt’), borrowed from Cockney rhyming slang, Latin, French and other languages (‘Cushy: Comfortable, safe, pleasant. From the Hindustani: khush, pleasure’) or even taken from the name of the Huntley and Palmer biscuit company, Tommy had a new word for almost everything. From Ammo to Zig-Zag, this is a fascinating glimpse into the world of our First World War heroes. So fetch the dooly and the other makings, brew up some char, and read on safe in the knowledge that you won’t be going over the top today…

Review: I’ve read loads of books about the Great War 1914-1918 and I’ve visited the old battlefields many times so I wasn’t expecting much from this latest ‘miscellany’ but on every page I discovered words and phrases I had not come acros before. Christopher Moore’s sly definitions also cast new light on many words I already knew. Weirdly, since it’s basically a tarted up dictionary,I found myself drawn straight into it and read the whole thing in one sitting (a long train journey). This may be something to do with Moore’s alter ego, a certain Captain Cartwright, the purported collector of the trench lingo in ‘Roger, Sausage & Whippet’. Cartwright’s story, as narrated in his letters home, seems entirely plausible and, where it touches on real events, is historically accurate. I got totally involved with him as a character and was mightily relieved when he survived the battle of the Somme. Perhaps he’s been spared for another outing?