Hot on the heels of her sparkling history of the 1930s, Juliet Gardiner has now written about the denouement of that difficult decade. The 1930s were light and shade: people hoped for a modernist, consumption-rich future, but feared impending disaster, chillingly represented in films and scaremongering popular literature as a remorseless, unassuaged air attack. When the bombing of Britain began in earnest in August 1940, there were many who saw this as a deserved end to a melancholy age of fruitless aspirations and failed idealism, a fitting apocalypse.

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