1 on my present list to give to everyone in the coming year. It will appeal to- anyone who appreciates the richness and diversity of human experience.' Tony Benn'Utterly engrossing, better than any kind of reality TV.' Gavin Esler'Funny, vivid, touching, angry, thoughtful - every page is a delight. They have the attraction of being stories, but REAL stories- Better than any novel.' Margaret Forster 'A lovely book. The result is a moving, intriguing, funny, at times heartbreaking book -unashamedly populist in the spirit of Forgotten Voices or indeed Margaret Forster's Diary of an Ordinary Woman.'I love these diaries. In Our Hidden Lives, Simon Garfield has skilfully woven a tapestry of diary entries in the rarely discussed but pivotal period of 1945 to 1948. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where remarkably most remain unread.
An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. A staggering work of popular history that uncovers the hopes and fears of post-war Britain in the 1940s. We Are At War continues Simon Garfields successful formula of interweaving five ordinary lives from the Mass-Observation archive begun with Our Hidden Lives.Of all the accounts written about the Second World War, none are more compelling than the personal diaries composed by those who lived through it.
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