Philip Gibbs

Born in London on 1 May 1877, Sir Philip Gibbs became a journalist and author at a young age and went on to build an unusually wide-ranging writing career. Before and after the war years he published fiction, essays, memoirs, and social commentary, but he is most closely associated with journalism.

During the First World War, he served as one of the official British war correspondents, reporting from the Western Front for a mass readership. Those experiences shaped some of his best-known books, including Now It Can Be Told, in which he reflected on the realities of wartime reporting and the limits imposed by censorship.

Gibbs was knighted in 1920, and his reputation in his lifetime rested on both his reporting and his extraordinary productivity as a writer. He died in Surrey on 10 March 1962, leaving behind a body of work that helps readers see how war, politics, and everyday life were described to the English-speaking public in the first half of the twentieth century.