At the turn of the millennium Juliet Gardiner, who has died aged 82, came to the realisation that though she had a respectable reputation as a freelance historian, she had yet to write the books that would be unmistakably hers. Over the next decade or so, she produced three major works, based on deep original research, on mid-20th-century Britain that at last did justice to her talents.
Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 (2004) provided a huge panoramic narrative-cum-portrait of the Home Front. “Sixty years after the end of the war,” she reflected in her foreword, “if the ‘big picture’ of a nation united in courageously facing a common enemy holds steady – as it surely does – so too do the ‘short stories’, the details of people’s varied experiences of war that complicate and nuance that picture.”
