It is now something of a commonplace to remark, as E. H. Carr originally did, that history is ‘an unending dialogue between the present and the past’. But in this particular book we might be forgiven for repeating Carr's observation. Though there are ample academic reasons justifying a study of wartime cultural production, many of them alluded to by Nick Hayes in the Introduction, there is also a special British fascination with the war to be accounted for. More than 50 years after its conclusion, the war continues to engage the minds of British people. So much so that we might conceive of the impact of the war on late twentieth-century British life in terms comparable to that of the Revolution on the French in the nineteenth century: an event which shaped, perhaps even convulsed, the thoughts and actions of those who lived many years afterwards, whose lives were set in the shadow of the event and the ideas it generated. By contrast the French, and continental Europeans generally, have reacted differently to the Second World War. It has, overtly at least, been less of a national obsession, and its cultural legacy has been borne more lightly. For the British memories of the war occupy a key function in creating a sense of nation. The war has taken its place alongside the winning of the football World Cup in 1966 as the two most recent versions of ‘their finest hour’.