In a series of powerful accounts drawn from diaries, letters, sound archives and interviews recorded during the period of devastation, discovery and transformation that make the blitz such an outstanding event in Britain's recent past, «The Blitz» brings to life the intense experiences, as they happened all over Britain.The blitz proved to be a highly effective laboratory constructed out of necessity, and intense forcing house for change.Yet, compared to other great events of the Second World...
“A young woman wearing a navy-blue duffle coat stood shivering in the vaulted Victorian booking hall of Temple Meads station in Bristol looking uncertainly around her. It was 1st January 1960 and the woman was me. I was sixteen years old, and I had run away from home.”Over the next ten years, the world changed around young Juliet Gardiner – as it did for most women in Britain. It was the start of a decade that was to be momentous for Britain’s history – politically, economically, socially and...
Acclaimed author of 'Wartime', Juliet Gardiner, brings to life the long neglected decade of the twentieth century – the 1930s.J.B. Priestley famously described the 'three Englands' he saw in the 1930s: Old England, nineteenth-century England and the new, post-war England. Thirties Britain was, indeed, a land of contrasts, at once a nation rendered hopeless by the Depression, unemployment and international tensions, yet also a place of complacent suburban home-owners with a baby Austin in every...