The love affair between the celebrated writer Elizabeth Bowen and the elegant and charming Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie blossomed quickly after their first meeting in 1941 and continued over the next three decades until Bowen's death.

Published for the first time, accompanied by extracts from Ritchie's remarkably candid diaries, the love letters of Elizabeth Bowen reveal an intelligent, passionate and wonderfully funny woman. In her letters and his diaries we hear the lovers' voices. Set against an ever-changing backdrop, from the Second World War to the Swinging Sixties, and featuring a glorious cast of socialites, writers and politicians, including Nancy Mitford, Iris Murdoch, Isaiah Berlin and John F Kennedy, Love's Civil War is at once a fascinating and intimate portrait of a great love that endures distance, circumstance and time.