Henry Woodd Nevinson (1856-1941) was a scholar and socialist who found his métier on the cusp of the twentieth century, as a war correspondent who would go on to chronicle the major wars and civil conflicts of his time, from South Africa and Russia to India and the Balkans. Reporting from the Western Front in 1918 he was wounded at the Dardanelles. Nevinson's work was marked by a strong sense of conscience and underscored by activism: directing relief work in Macedonia and Albania, campaigning against the dreadful mistreatment of bonded labourers in Portuguese Angola, and supporting female suffrage in Britain. (He would marry the suffragette Evelyn Sharp.)

Nevinson wrote three volumes of autobiography: Changes and Chances (1923), More Changes, More Chances (1925), and Last Changes, Last Chances (1928). Fire of Life, first published in 1935, is an expert abridgement of this trilogy.