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Every man who served in the Great War is now deceased, but they have left behind them an enormous collection of oral history, which captures the authentic voices of the front line soldiers. In Voices from the Front, oral historian Peter Hart brings together accounts from across the conflict, from soldiers, sailors and airmen, from officers and privates alike. In the course of his research, he talked to men who saw their friends die in front of them, who were seriously wounded themselves, men who refused to fight on principle and those whose indomitable spirit carried them through thick and thin. Sometimes they were there at crucial turning points in the war - going over the top in the slaughter of the Somme in 1916 or punching through the German lines to victory in 1918 - and sometimes they sweated, toiled and suffered on a forgotten front, thousands of miles from home. In the vein of The Beauty and the Sorrow, this is the First World War seen through the eyes of the men who experienced it for themselves.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• 1. Reconnaissance: Violence, Representation, and Britain's Second World War
• 2. The Figure of the Airman
• 3. What targets for bombs: Spectacle, Reconstruction, and the London Blitz
• 4. Side Show or Second Front?: The Legibility of Battle in North Africa
• 5. War Aims and Outcomes
• 6. Were All Prisoners of War
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

"British Writing of the Second World War" is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of cultural representations of violence to the administration of the war effort. A theoretical account of the symbolic practices which connect military violence to policy provides a framework for analysing imaginative and documentary literature in its relations both to propaganda and to Peoples War ideals of social reconstruction. The book evaluates wartime fictions and memoirs in the context of official and unofficial discourses about military aviation, the Blitz, campaigns in North Africa, war aims, the conscript Army and the Home Front, Prisoners of War, and the Holocaust. It uncovers the processes by which the meanings the war had for participants were produced, and provides an extensive bibliographical resource for future scholarship.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)