Alan Allport
Yale University Press
October 2009
Reviews and Features
Winner of the 2010 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award
A London Evening Standard Best Book of the Year 2009
A Scotsman Best Book of the Year 2009
"A wonderfully insightful study ... remarkably moving" - Dominic Sandbrook (Never Had It So Good), The Sunday Times
"A vivid picture of thousands of individual crises ... perceptive and highly readable" - Susan Pedersen, The London Review of Books
"Thoughtful, well written ... an important book" - Philip Ziegler, The Spectator
"Brilliant insight ... a great read for everyone who cares about the human cost of war" - Taylor Downing, History Today
"Refreshing and fascinating ... an extremely interesting and lively read which adds greatly to our understanding of the demobilisation process" - Mark Connolly, Journal of Military History
"Splendidly rooted in its particular time and place, but with lessons for 21st Century American readers seeking to understand why those returning from the battlefield have a tough time settling down at home ... insightful and worthwhile" - Martin Rubin, The Washington Times
"A highly impressive debut, demonstrating great scholarship ... the most insightful text on the 1940s to have appeared this year" - Ian Cawood, Times Literary Supplement
"A special and powerful book. It brims with scholarship, insight, detail, and compassion ... Alan Allport does full justice to a forgotten part of a great generation" - Peter Hennessy (Never Again: Britain 1945-51)
"A masterful study ... though the research behind the book has clearly been prodigious, it nonetheless manages to wear its erudition lightly" - Roger Moorhouse (Killing Hitler), BBC History Magazine
"Fascinating and disturbing ... a powerful and pioneering study" - Richard Overy (Why the Allies Won; 1939: Countdown to War), The Literary Review
"A particularly welcome addition to the field ... highly readable" - Hester Vaizey, The Times Higher Education
"A powerful tale, wonderfully told" - Peter Stansky (The First Day of the Blitz)
"Wonderfully researched, sensitively written and often very moving, Demobbed tells an important, underappreciated story that still resonates today" - David Kynaston (Austerity Britain, 1945-1951)
"Wry, humane, and eloquent ... Alan Allport shows how demobilised troops sought a return to normalcy and at the same time realized that life would never be the same again. Their stories linger with us still" - Peter Mandler (The English National Character)
"A compelling, sobering, and thought-provoking picture" - Juliet Gardiner (Wartime: Britain 1939-1945)
Post-Blogging the British Demobilisation Experience: June 1945 - June 1946
Demobbed is the real story of what happened when millions of ex-servicemen returned home. Most had been absent for years, and the joy of arrival was often clouded with ambivalence, regrets and fears. Returning soldiers faced both practical and psychological problems, from reasserting their place in the family home to rejoining a much-altered labour force. Civilians worried that their homecoming heroes had been barbarized by their experiences and would bring crime and violence back from the battlefield. 'Problem veterans' preoccupied the entire country. Alan Allport draws on their personal letters and diaries, on newspapers, reports, novels and films to illuminate the darker side of the homecoming experience for ex-servicemen, their families and society at large - a gripping story that's in danger of being lost to national memory.
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