Praise for The Path of Peace: 'A formidable achievement' Rory Stewart 'Thoughtful [ and] heartfelt' Observer 'Profound [ and] compelling' Spectator 'A noble endeavour' New Statesman
In 2021, Anthony Seldon, inspired by a fallen First World War soldier who dreamed of a 'Via Sacra' to commemorate the war dead and stand as a marker for the triumph of peace, set out on a 1,000km walk tracing the historic route of the Western Front. He went on to recount that story in the widely acclaimed The Path of Peace. But there wasn't to be lasting peace, with the continent falling into an even more horrific war two decades later.
In The Path of Light, Seldon sets out to walk a new 1,300 km route from the same starting point at Kilometre Zero to Auschwitz, discovering in the towns and villages through which he walks stories of women and men who bravely protected the vulnerable and stood up to evil in the face of unimaginable brutality during the Second World War.
As he ruminates on these 'figures of light', whose uplifting stories he encounters along his path, a pattern begins to emerge about how we can draw on their lives to build a better and more peaceful world, never more needed than now, with the ominous and increasing drumbeat of belligerence globally that month by month is the constant backdrop of his walk between 2023 and 2025. It proved a harder book to write than The Path of Peace. But it was a project he knew he had to complete, whatever the cost.
1: Crossing the Rhine 2: Black Forest, White Rose 3: Swiftly Flows the
Danube: Ulm to Donauwörth 4: One Way, Four Paths - From Donauwörth to
Nuremberg 5: The Road to Flossenbürg 6: Sudetenland: From Flossenbürg to
Prague 7: Prague, Lidice, Terezín 8: Central and East Bohemia: Prague to
Pardubice 9: Into Moravia: Pardubice to Ostrava 10: Silesia, Poland, Auschwitz
Sir Anthony Seldon is an educator, historian, writer and commentator. He is author or editor of over forty books on contemporary history, politics and education, including the Sunday Times bestsellers Johnson at 10 and Truss at 10.
