It's quite a challenge to pick up this book with the intention to read it cover to cover - all 700 or so pages of it. I'm so glad I have. This is a book that fleshes out in considerable detail the knowledge that most of us have - or think we have - of life on the Home Front in WWII. Though scholarly, it's intensely readable, and each chapter is crammed with nuggets of fascinating information, whether it's about evacuees, the unremitting horrors of the Blitz, coping with rationing, wartime crime....anything and everything about daily life in the bleakly difficult years of the war. I'm left with a renewed respect for the citizens who coped with privation, hunger, homelessness, loss and just general dinginess, as well as surprise at the level of lawlessness among certain sections of the population. This book is a really absorbing read. ( )

Juliet Gardiner's Wartime is a superb social history of Britain's "Home Front" experience in the Second World War. Drawing both upon the abundant literature about the war and Mass-Observation diaries kept by contemporaries, she gives readers a real sense of what the war was like for the people of Britain. By far the best book about the subject, it is essential reading for anyone interested in learning about how Britons lived, survived, and died during the long conflict that continues to cast its shadow upon the nation. ( )

A splendidly readable narrative account of Britain during the second world war, focusing on the fabric of civilian life, rather than on major political and military events, though there is sufficient detail of these to provide the necessary understanding of the context. The book's great achievement is to enable the reader really to feel what it meant to be a citizen of a country at war, the day to day impact of restrictions on activities as well as the horrors of the Blitz and the V1/V2 raids. It also covers in a balanced way less well known aspects such as conscientious objectors of various kinds and the frankly outrageous treatment meted out to German and Italian people living in Britain, the great majority of whom were loyal to Britain and in many cases were refugees from Nazism, including Jews, or long settled Italian families running restaurants. A fascinating eye-opener of a book. ( )