1. Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 201–9.
2. C.V. Wedgwood, The King’s War (London: Collins, 1958; a Fontana paperback in two editions, 1966 and 1968).
3. I wish that I could remember the authors of most of the ‘pop’ histories and novels about the war that I read between 1966 and 1970, when still at school; I got through at least a score. Some were works from the earlier part of the century that remained popular, often reprinted and available in most public libraries, of which the most celebrated was Margaret Irwin, The Stranger Prince (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937). A classic example of a historical work from the period itself, that used most of the narrative devices of fiction, was
4. Frank Knight, Prince of Cavaliers (London: Macdonald, 1967).
5. W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Methuen, 1930. Quotation from 1965 Penguin edition), p. 71. The popularity of the work during the 1960s may have had something to do with the fact that the latter, like the early 1930s, was a period much given to questioning militarism and jingoism, and to throwing off the traditional assumptions of British culture. It must, however, also have gained relevance from the continued teaching in British schools of the sort of history that the book was designed to lampoon, reinforced by a generation of masters whose great formative experience had been the Second World War, an event which for them reversed the apparent lessons of the First World War.