I am confining my list of books that have influenced me most to those that I have read - or more likely reread - most recently while writing The Thirties: an intimate history and The Blitz: the British under attack (both Harper Press, 2010).

Juliet Gardiner on...

The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 by Angus Calder

Although Angus Calder’s The People’s War was published in 1969, it remains a magisterial work, an eminently readable and moving account of Britain’s Home Front. Click here to read more...

At Mrs Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is one of the quiet, deceptive writers who seem to be writing about ordinary lives in the home counties but has a gimlet eye for human absurdities and fallibilities. Click here to read more...

Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh

I laugh out loud so much that I hardly dare read Evelyn Waugh’s wartime trilogy Sword of Honour in public places. Click here to read more...

To Bed with Grand Music by Sarah Russell

Sarah Russell’s To Bed with Grand Music first published in 1947 was an extraordinary novel for its time. Russell (aka Marghanita Laski) writes of awartime rake’s progress. Click here to read more...

The Diary of Virginia Wolf
In my view there is no finer diarist of the 20th century than Virginia Woolf, and the two volumes that span the decade from 1931  to her suicide in 1941 provide a penetrating and poetic witness to the period. Click here to read more...

The Long Weekend by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge
Published at the outbreak of war and largely relying on newspaper cuttings, The Long Weekend by the poet Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, still has a sharpness and immediacy. Click here to read more...

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