Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941

Alan Allport is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Syracuse University. Born in Liverpool, he grew up listening to family stories of the Merseyside Blitz and the Battle of the Atlantic while building Airfix kits and reading comics. He attended Liverpool Polytechnic where he received an undergraduate degree in physics; afterwards he emigrated to the United States, where he began a second life as a historian. He is the author of two previous volumes of history, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War 1939-1945, described by the historian Andrew Roberts as 'Second World War history at its best', and Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War, which won the 2010 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Simultaneously incisive but nuanced, and studded with sharp pen portraits, Britain at Bay offers a scholarly, invigorating and beautifully constructed tour d'horizon of perhaps the four most crucial years in our island story.
Britain at Bay might be the single best examination of British politics, society and strategy in these four years that has ever been written ... beautifully written, thoroughly researched and cleverly presented. I put my copy down with deep satisfaction.
Britain's wartime story has been told many times, but never as cleverly as this. Alan Allport begins with JRR Tolkien writing The Lord of the Rings, and moves on to the IRA bombing of Coventry in August 1939. Familiar stories such as Munich, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain are here, but the social and cultural framing is always unexpected. ... A bracing, surprising, provocative book, and an enormous pleasure to read
This extraordinary book punctures many of the myths that have become so influential about Britain in the Second World War without robbing the period of its spectacular drama
Written with style and verve, Britain at Bay will make you think anew not just about the war, but about the Britain and the Britons that fought it. A book for anyone who wants to understand this crucial period in the nation's history.
Original, compelling, timely. This is a history that reminds us of the Britain behind the myth of its Second World War. It's a history that many will want to argue with. And that everyone should read.
The beautifully-written Britain at Bay is an impregnable fortress of good sense gallantly resisting the crass sentimentality, exaggeration and naïve hindsight of so many accounts of Britain in the early second world war. With great élan, built on deep reserves of historical knowledge, it puts Chamberlain and Churchill in perspective, the Blitz, the Battle of Britain and Battle of the Atlantic in true proportion, and the progress of the imperial war abroad in panoramic view. Its precise and pointed judgements on events, people, and arguments are a bracing reminder of the power of brilliant history to make us reconsider what we think we know about the most familiar part of the British past.
Brave and bold ... much needed antidote to the "keep calm and carry on" strain of nostalgia ... Allport moves with ease, wit and insight between the high political and diplomatic, the social and economic, the strategic and military, with biographical vignettes and anecdotes, illustrating the lived experience of ordinary people

List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Foreword
A Note on Money
 
Part One: The British Way and Purpose
1. Shire Folk
2. Ulster Kristallnacht
3. A Different Kind of Nation
4. The School of Empire
 
Part Two: Umbrella Man
5. Guilty Man
6. The Bones of a British Grenadier
7. The Stupidest Thing That Has Ever Been Done
8. To Make Gentle the Life of the World
9. The Sharpening of the Claws
 
Part Three: Companions in Misfortune
10. The Other Dunkirk
11. Class War
12. Bras-Dessus, Bras-Dessous
13. In the Name of God
14. A Certain Eventuality
 
Part Four: And Only England Stands
15. Lunatic Relief
16. All Our Past Proclaims Our Future
17. Margins
18. The Scouring of the Shire Folk
 
Part Five: ‘A New and Most Bitter Phase of the War’
19. American Lebensraum
20. Shapeless, Measureless Peril
21. The Carotid Artery of Empire
22. Taking the Gloves Off
23. March on to Better Days
 
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index