Hundreds of books have been published on the Second World War, yet rarely do we read anything new. Now, in "Private Battles" - as we follow four ordinary young people telling the story of how we barely survived the war - we have one of the most refreshing and original takes on the period ever published. The challenges and struggles of the writers' own small battles give a startlingly immediate impression of what life was really like. Readers of "Our Hidden Lives" and "We Are At War" will be familiar with two of the diarists: Maggie Joy Blunt, the perceptive but frustrated young writer living alone near Slough, and Pam Ashford, the shipping clerk in Glasgow writing of office life as if it were an episode of "The Archers", even when she starts working for the Americans. The two new diarists are equally engrossing: Edward Stebbing, a 20-year-old discharged soldier living with a stern landlady in Essex; and Larry du Parc, a research chemist from Hertfordshire, father of two children and proposer of several unique scientific ways to beat the Nazis. "Private Battles" turns much of the traditional view of Britain's war effort on its head.
Churchill does not emerge as the universally popular wartime figure; the country is not a fit and streamlined unit ready to fend off any foe, but an exhausted, divided and ailing one; and while there are many examples of a Dunkirk spirit, there are just as many of spiteful behaviour and selfishness.
- ISBN10 0091910765
- ISBN13 9780091910761
- Publish Date 7 September 2006
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 10 August 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Ebury Publishing
- Imprint Ebury Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 560
- Language English