Blitz Spirit

Brown’s book features an eclectic selection from the wartime years and is full of fascinating and sometimes surprising insights. * Mail on Sunday *A brilliant new compendium of extracts from wartime diaries. * The Paris Review *A priceless collation and an insight like nothing else. Never more timely or poignant, these writers have no time for clichés or platitudes, only an urgency to tell it like it is. Humour, despair, confusion, hope - humanity laid bare, unique and universal. * Simon Garfield, Editor of Our Hidden Lives and We Are at War *What happened, when did it happen, why did it happen - are all questions historians deal with daily as they look backwards at events. But the glory of the Mass Observation archive is that the writers are looking forward. Is Churchill a hero or a villain? Are the Germans capable of bombing London? And who is that woman - or is it a man? - being propositioned in the blackout? The Mass Observation diarists record it all as they see it, and history is made anew in front of our eyes. * Judith Flanders, author of The Making of Home *In September 1944, looking back on the previous five years, a laboratory technician from Potters Bar declares that his “main feeling is one of awe at the huge panorama of events which we have lived through”. Brown has cleverly captured exactly this in this delightful book, and the result is a tonic. – Lucy Scholes * The Telegraph *One for the Christmas gift list. * NFOP Magazine *Makes for very entertaining reading. * My Weekly *Finally, a book that is proving very therapeutic in these difficult times. Blitz Spirit, compiled by Becky Brown, is a lovingly assembled collage of extracts from Mass Observation diaries written during the Second World War. Full of doubt, fear, anger and rueful comedy, they give the lie to the idea that the Brits maintained a stiff upper lip, but it’s immensely consoling to know that our forebears sometimes thought that they were living through the end times but survived to enjoy better and brighter days. – Jonathan Coe * The Times *A hugely affecting and absorbing read. * The Bookseller *Eye-opening. * Cumbria Life *

Becky Brown is an anthologist, editor and literary agent. Her eclectic work centres around a fascination with forgotten voices and hidden stories. She lives between Glasgow and London.

The Mass-Observation Archive is one of Britain’s richest collections of material about everyday life. It contains papers generated by the original Mass-Observation social research organisation (from 1937 to the early 1950s) and newer material collected continuously since 1981. At its core is an unrivalled series of “ordinary” people’s diaries, most of which were kept during the Second World War. The Archive is in the care of the University of Sussex.