As featured on the Antiques Roadshow, the work of Timothy Corsellis is made available here, for the first time, in a collected edition. One hundred poems have been chosen and arranged in such a way as to bring out the unique literary and historical interest of the short life and long work of this unusual war poet. They have been grouped in roughly chronological order in six chapters, each accompanied by a thematic introduction which places them in the social and intellectual contexts from which they sprung: the Munich crisis and the search for other ideas of a Christian society, the fall of France and the possibility of a Federal Union, days in the East End and nights in Chelsea during and after the Blitz, life and death in the air. The poems do not only tell a personal tale; they also tell a political one. Interwoven with the biography of a gifted poet whose life and work were cut tragically short by his wartime death, are two even more striking stories. The first is the historical account of an RAF-trained pilot who, in January 1941, at the height of the Blitz, refused to become a bomber-pilot because it would mean the bombing of civilians. The second is the literary story of the connections between Timothy Corsellis and Stephen Spender, their actual encounter in September 1941 and its enduring consequences. “As well as being the complete works of Timothy Corsellis, The Unassuming Sky is also an excellent piece of social history and a first-rate addition to WW2 literature. He emerges as an extraordinarily mature person with a vigorous mind whose mixture of practicality and imagination, philosophy and warmth, fills one at this late stage with huge sadness for his loss. Yet much was accomplished. He could not have had a better biography.” - Dr Ronald Blythe ''Goethals necessarily records a life and work in progress, and her thorough investigation provides a witness statement in that debate about the comparative poetry of the world wars.'' - Dr. Martyn Halsall, Church Times. 21/28 December 2012 “Helen Goethals has constructed the story of the short life of this remarkable man, born in 1921 and killed by accident in an aeroplane in Dumfriesshire in 1941, in six periods, each situating within it a group of his poems relevant to the period, totalling one hundred poems in all. Some of these poems were published in anthologies in the years before and after the end of World War II, some in later collections, but the majority receive their first printing here. Goethals presents a single life as a thread in the fabric of the vast social problem that was the Second World War.” - Ralph Townsend, The Trusty Servant, 114 (November 2012) p. 19. As featured on the Antiques Roadshow, the work of Timothy Corsellis is made available here, for the first time, in a collected edition. One hundred poems have been chosen and arranged in such a way as to bring out the unique literary and historical interest of the short life and long work of this unusual war poet. They have been grouped in roughly chronological order in six chapters, each accompanied by a thematic introduction which places them in the social and intellectual contexts from which they sprung: the Munich crisis and the search for other ideas of a Christian society, the fall of France and the possibility of a Federal Union, days in the East End and nights in Chelsea during and after the Blitz, life and death in the air. The poems do not only tell a personal tale; they also tell a political one. Interwoven with the biography of a gifted poet whose life and work were cut tragically short by his wartime death, are two even more striking stories. The first is the historical account of an R.A.F.-trained pilot who, in January 1941, at the height of the Blitz, refused to become a bomber-pilot because it would mean the bombing of civilians. The second is the literary story of the connections between Timothy Corsellis and Stephen Spender, their actual encounter in September 1941 and its enduring consequences.