Publisher's Synopsis
This book is, in a sense, a sequel to the author's 'Near East',  but it covers vaster and more remote areas of a world at war.  Cecil Beaton was sent to India and China by the Ministry of Information to take photographs;  and wherever he went he also made notes, of the places he visited, the sites he saw and the people he met. Readers of 'Near East' will need no reminder of the acuteness, sensibility and wit of his observation, or of what one reviewer called "his eye for texture and the pattern" which "gives something intimate and fresh to all his notes".  Beaton's narrative begins dramatically, for the plane on which he was leaving for India crashed in taking off; the two or three pages in which he describes this little tragedy are written with great poignancy.  His picture of India is characteristic in its combination of richly coloured description, personal experience and frank portraiture; and his long diary of a visit to Assam, Burma and the Arakan Front-  the splendours  and ardours of the journey, and the spirit of the fighting men he found there-  is we believe, a piece of writing of the first order.  From India across the Himalayas by air and entered Free China, of which he writes with sympathy and great frankness.  The appalling conditions under which he made a journey to and from a Chinese front, his exciting or grotesque adventures 'en rout'  and his portraits of Chinese notabilities, and of British and American soldiers and workers, make some of the most vivid reading of the war.  The book ends in New York in a heat wave, after a return journey by air from India.  'Far East' provides a brilliant and authentic glimpse of India and China at war, against a profuse oriental background. It is illustrated by a choice of the authors magnificent photographs.
 
B.T.Batsford ltd.; 1945. First edition. Hardcover with unclipped dust cover. Dust cover in fair condition, some discolouring to edges. Small tears her and there- rubbed to top and bottom of spine. Slight sunning to spine. Mark to front paste down. Coloured frontispiece depicting 'River scene, Kweilin: from a watercolour by author'. Black and white photographs and some drawings. Edges sprayed red to top. Binding tight and text clean. Preowned. No ISBN.