Michael Palin is the member of the Monty Python team who irritates me the least. He has become more widely known for his travelogue TV programmes, starting with his attempt to emulate Phileas Fogg and travel around the world in eighty days. There has been a multiplicity of these since, including a visit to North Korea. He is also a fairly prolific writer, with books to accompany all his travel programmes and several volumes of diaries. This is a little different as Palin delves into the history of his family: specifically his great-uncle Harry who died in action in September 1916 on the Somme. Henry William Bourne Palin (Harry) was born in 1884, making him 32 when he died. Palin had a limited amount of information to work with, his ancestor wasn’t of any significance and records are scarce. Inevitably there is a great deal of deduction, supposition and guesswork. During the war years (Harry was in the war from the beginning) Harry kept a diary. Again there is limited information as Harry wasn’t a florid or voluminous diarist, his summations of the day were quite sparse. There were also family letters to draw on and more detailed information from his time in New Zealand. Before the War Harry appears to have been a bit of a drifter. He didn’t really settle anywhere and school (Shrewsbury) was not a success. His family didn’t really know what to do with him. He was packed off to India a couple of times: once to work on the railways and once on a tea plantation. It seems he was effectively sacked from both. Eventually he ended up in New Zealand from 1912 where he worked on a farm. It was from there that he joined up in 1914 and went with the ANZAC forces to Egypt and on to Gallipoli. Palin clearly had more to work with when it comes to descriptions of the war and conditions facing the ordinary soldiers. Harry was a private through most of his war, becoming a lance corporal not long before his death. The descriptions of trench life are what you would expect and the records from New Zealand soldiers have been preserved (a great deal of information about British soldiers was destroyed during the blitz). Harry does comment sometimes about the stupidity of what they are doing and the incompetence of senior officers, which is pretty much on record when it comes to Gallipoli. Harry moved to the Western Front where he died on the Somme. His body was never found and so there is no grave; his name is on the memorial wall for fallen new Zealand soldiers. Palin is a humane and thoughtful narrator, he lets the reader know when there are pieces missing. History isn’t just the history of the great and Palin has told the story of someone whose story would otherwise have been lost. Harry was a minor cog in the imperial machine. If you like this sort of history, you will probably like this.