Their Darkest Hour: The Hidden History of the Home Front 1939-1945 - Tapa dura

The popular image of the Home Front in the Second World War is of cheery Londoners, singing along to Vera Lynn on the radio and making do and mending while the bombs burst all around them. But there is another side to life in wartime Britain. Their Darkest Hour is a stimulating, unsentimental portrait of a nation at war telling the story - often disturbing, sometimes bilarious - of that other side: Fifth-columinsts, internment, the Black Market, racism, crime, class tensions and morality. Here, between two covers for the first time, is a side of the British at war that many would prefer to forget.

Stuart Hylton's previous books include Rationing to Rock: The 1950s Revisited and The Magical History Tour: The 1960s Revisited. He has also written extensively about the modern history of Reading in the twentieth century, in particular Reading at War.