Angela Thirkell and Cheerfulness Breaks In

Britain topples into the Second World War, and Barsetshire braces itself to deal with invaders: refugees, evacuees, foreigners, the lower-classes, and even socialists. Angela Thirkell's view of the war from the upper-class county perspective is a vision of the past as one part of it would have liked it to have been. She delights in caricature, satire, cutting down to size, and savage attacks on those who damage the glories of English civilisation. Pulling together, not shirking your turn in the communcal evacuees' canteen, being polite to the rude and being pleasant to the revolting are all part of the British Home Front at war. For readers who can do their own blackout and can cook rabbit stew.