A memoir of the author's time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris. It documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile 'Hotel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts.

Presents an account of the author's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s. It provides descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment.

Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit.

Flory, a white timber merchant, befriends Dr Veraswami, a black enthusiast for Empire. The doctor needs help. U Po Kyin, Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada, is plotting his downfall. The only thing that can save him is European patronage: membership of the hitherto all-white Club.

Describes the hopes and cynical betrayals of the author's experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War.

'There is no doubt that [Quartered Safe Out Here] is one of the great personal memoirs of the Second World War' John Keegan