You might expect that an exhaustively researched book, sporting over fifty concluding pages of references and acknowledgements, would be on the heavy side, something to be slogged through; but this account of the changing expectations and practices of marriage and attachment, from the end of the First World War to the start of the Sixties free-for-all, is anything but. The scholarly research simply serves to provide telling instances of the changing and blending trends that it analyses.

Put simply, the book describes how the expectations and presumptions of young people changed over the years, from prewar certainties and then from wartime expedients and limitations. The historian Martin Francis is quoted as saying that ‘Love and marriage, as much as a new council house or free hospital care,