Download or read book Forces Sweethearts written by Joanna Lumley and published by Bloomsbury Pub Limited. This book was released on 1993-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on both archive material and contributions from the public, this book looks at various aspects of wartime romance. It includes facsimiles of letters, postcards, telegrams, diaries, Valentine cards, honeymoon hotel bills, concert programs and press cuttings.

Download or read book Entertaining the Troops written by Kiri Bloom Walden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the foundation and work of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) and other entertainment organisations such as CEMA and Stars in Battledress. These organisations ensured that troops in all theatres of the Second World War were visited by big bands, ballet stars, Shakespearian actors and the most famous popular entertainers of the day in order to raise morale. Many of Britain's biggest stars cut their teeth performing on makeshift stages to homesick soldiers, sailors and airmen and women during the war years, with famous performers including Laurence Olivier, Gracie Fields, George Formby, Vera Lynn, Margot Fonteyn and members of The Goons. This book also details the alternative arrangements made when the entertainment organisations couldn't come – the forces often put on their own shows, with pantomimes and plays written and performed by POWs being a prime example.

Download or read book Hitler s Airwaves written by H. J. P. Bergmeier and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jazz was banned from German broadcasting as soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933. Yet throughout World War II, American jazz and swing were core components of the Third Reich's propaganda. Jazz classics such as W.C. Handy's famous St. Louis Blues, their lyrics neatly tampered with, came over the airwaves, alongside the famous Germany Calling programmes directed at Britain and allied forces around the world.

Download or read book BRITAIN S WAR written by Daniel Todman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2017 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most terrible emergency in Britain's history, the Second World War required an unprecedented national effort. An exhausted country had to fight an unexpectedly long war and found itself much diminished amongst the victors. Yet the outcome of the war was nonetheless a triumph, not least for a political system that proved well adapted to the demands of a total conflict and for a population who had to make many sacrifices but who were spared most of the horrors experienced in the rest of Europe. Britain's War is a narrative of these epic events, an analysis of the myriad factors that shaped military success and failure, and an explanation of what the war tells us about the history of modern Britain. As compelling on the major military events as he is on the experience of ordinary people living through exceptional times, Todman suffuses his extraordinary book with a vivid sense of a struggle which left nobody unchanged - and explores why, despite terror, separation and deprivation, Britons were overwhelmingly willing to pay the price of victory.

Download or read book The Wartime Years written by John Stanley and published by Character-19. This book was released on 2020-06-20 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is it that just about every single one of us just loves a good old wallow in nostalgia? It’s probably as simple as when most of us look back we have a tendency to ‘accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative’. Then again as we get older, perhaps, there’s more to look back on, than to look forward to! However, a remembrance of things past is not just confined to old people hoping to recapture their lost youth, many younger people also cherish things from years ago – it might be retro design, fashion or a life that seemed somehow more exciting – in a slower kind of way. The idea of accentuating the good from times past is actually a line from an old Bing Crosby song, so that tells you that nostalgia has been around for a long time, but shows no sign of losing its appeal. There’s no chance that nostalgia is going to go out of fashion any time soon. They say that a picture’s worth a thousand words and so on that basis there’s about 100,000 words in what follows – that’s many more than most average books contain and more than enough to keep you entertained and informed about people, places, sights and history. During the early part of the World War II all places of entertainment were closed, but it soon changed when the government realised that it was important, under such testing circumstances, that everyone somehow tried to keep enjoying themselves. How Britain coped with war through the music, films, dancing and comedy is all here in this superbly illustrated book. It takes us on a journey through the six years of war with fantastic archive photographs that bring to life the faces, places and personalities that made these years so memorable. Global pandemics aside, we had hoped we shall never see such times again but it’s fascinating to see, and hear, what helped Britain to ‘keep smiling through’. This book tells a fascinating story of how the war kept people ‘smiling through’, with the likes of Vera Lynn, Sinatra, Glenn Miller, Dance Bands and many more. Life, especially today, seems to be moving ever faster, while constantly shifting and changing, which is perhaps why our own memories are so special, particularly when combined with a great photograph. Sometimes these thoughts are very intimate; at other times they are more of a shared, collective memory affecting how we view the world or momentous events.

Download or read book Britain s War A New World 1942 1947 written by Daniel Todman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume of Daniel Todman's account of Great Britain and World War II The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War II, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947, begins with the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history: the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese. As in the first volume of Todman's epic account of British involvement in World War II ("Total history at its best," according to Jay Winter), he highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and others, focusing on its inhabitants, its defenders, and its wartime leadership. Todman explores the plight of families doomed to spend the war struggling with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and, above all, the absence of their loved ones and the uncertainty of their return. It also documents the full impact of the entrance into the war by the United States, and its ascendant stewardship of the war. Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 is a triumph of narrative and research. Todman explains complex issues of strategy and economics clearly while never losing sight of the human consequences--at home and abroad--of the way that Britain fought its war. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped Great Britain and the world.

Download or read book Sixties British Pop Outside in written by Gordon Ross Thompson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Itchycoo Park, 1964-1970-the second volume of Sixties British Pop, Outside In- explores how London songwriters, musicians, and production crews navigated the era's cultural upheavals by reimagining the pop-music envelope. British songwriters, musicians, and production crews explored form, sound, and subject matter as western society grappled with racism, sexism, war, revolution, and migration in a postcolonial world. As these creators and curators of popular culture combined interests in jazz, folk, blues, Indian ragas, and western classical music, they created sophisticated hybrid forms that redefined pop music. Based on extensive research and drawing on vintage and original interviews, Sixties British Pop, Outside In contextualizes the world of the Beatles through King Crimson in the frameworks of the postwar surge in births that created the Bulge Generation in the UK (and Baby Boomers in America), emergent technologies, English behavior, and the places and spaces in which people created and consumed pop music"--

Download or read book The People s Songs written by Stuart Maconie and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are the songs that we have listened to, laughed to, loved to and laboured to, as well as downed tools and danced to. Covering the last seven decades, Stuart Maconie looks at the songs that have sound tracked our changing times, and – just sometimes – changed the way we feel. Beginning with Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’, a song that reassured a nation parted from their loved ones by the turmoil of war, and culminating with the manic energy of ‘Bonkers’, Dizzee Rascal’s anthem for the push and rush of the 21st century inner city, The People’s Songs takes a tour of our island’s pop music, and asks what it means to us. This is not a rock critique about the 50 greatest tracks ever recorded. Rather, it is a celebration of songs that tell us something about a changing Britain during the dramatic and kaleidoscopic period from the Second World War to the present day. Here are songs about work, war, class, leisure, race, family, drugs, sex, patriotism and more, recorded in times of prosperity or poverty. This is the music that inspired haircuts and dance crazes, but also protest and social change. The companion to Stuart Maconie’s landmark Radio 2 series, The People’s Songs shows us the power of ‘cheap’ pop music, one of Britain’s greatest exports. These are the songs we worked to and partied to, and grown up and grown old to – from ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ to ‘Rehab', ‘She Loves You’ to ‘Star Man’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ to ‘Radio Ga Ga’.

Download or read book A Stroll Down Piccadilly written by M.T. Harris and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Stroll Down Piccadilly is a biographical narrative style memoir of James Headley Harris. Jim and his best friend Harry learned about the world and tried to adjust to the bombings, death, and rationings of the World War ll era in Birmingham, England. When they were of age, they both signed up for service, but were placed in different regiments. Jims' experience in the Royal Marines includes extensive training and his service aboard two ships; thus the trials and tribulations of navy life, making boys into men. Lest we forget...

Download or read book The Power of Names written by Stilovsky and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2018-05-09 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Names are so important as they identify and distinguish us from everyone else. But its not just our own names that hold such fascination those of the rich and famous play a great part in our lives. Felix Schrodinger and Pyotr Stilovsky have compiled in this, the second volume of the series, a compendium of information which will appeal to all who are intrigued with names and seek out knowledge for its own sake.

Download or read book Notes from the Henhouse written by Elspeth Barker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sharp and witty collection of autobiographical essays by the late Elspeth Barker—acclaimed journalist and author of the beloved modern classic O Caledonia. Following the publication of her acclaimed, darkly funny novel O Caledonia, Elspeth Barker’s sharp and witty essays appeared regularly in the national press. Notes from the Henhouse, a selection of the most personal of these pieces, welcomes readers into the celebrated writer’s life. Tracing Barker’s upbringing from her Scottish roots, these essays beautifully capture her time with the poet George Barker and her profound sense of loss following his death. She writes about George’s former lover Elizabeth Smart and other figures from 1950s bohemia and 1960s counterculture. Pieces like “Thoughts in a Garden,” equal parts hilarious and moving, read like dispatches from the front lines of country living, depicting the vagaries of raising a large family and assorted pets in a damp and drafty farmhouse. Vivid, charming, and wholly original, Notes from the Henhouse is a wonderful glimpse into the life of an extraordinary writer.

Download or read book Wives and Sweethearts written by Alastair Massie and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it like to fall in love with a soldier? What is it like to be a soldier in love? Throughout history, those serving in the British Army have combined romantic relationships with their military duties. In wartime especially, all the usual emotions experienced by men and women in love are felt to a heightened degree. The sense of danger, and the sometimes years of separation imposed by service abroad, make the heartache of loss and the joy of reunion all the greater. For loved ones parted by war, writing has always been of crucial importance in maintaining contact. Even when it was difficult to send a letter, or not easy to explain feelings when one could, soldiers - be they generals, young officers or privates - have persevered. In a celebration of love on the frontline during the First and Second World Wars, the archives of the National Army Museum, replete with letters, diaries and photographs, are thrown open to reveal fascinating stories of soldiers, their wives and sweethearts. Love found, love lost and love enduring all have their place in the pages of this book.

Download or read book Loving Arms written by Karen Schneider and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Loving Arms examines the war-related writings of five British women whose works explore the connections among gender, war, and story-telling. While not the first study to relate the subjects of gender and war, it is the first within a growing body of criticism to focus specifically on British culture during and after World War II. Evoking the famous "St. Crispin's Day" speech from Henry V and then her own father's account of being moved to tears on V-J Day because he had been too young to fight, Karen Schneider posits that the war story has a far-reaching potency. She admits—perhaps for all of us—that such stories "had powerfully shaped my consciousness in ways I could not completely resist." How a story is narrated and by whom are matters of no small importance. As widely defined and accepted, war stories are men's stories. If we are to hear an "other" story of war, then we must listen to the stories women tell. Many of the war stories written by women insist that war is not the condition of men but rather the condition of humanity, beginning with relations between the sexes. For the five women whose work is examined in Loving Arms—Stevie Smith, Katharine Burdekin, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Doris Lessing—this latter point was particularly relevant. Their positions as women within a patriarchal, militarist culture that was externally threatened by an overtly fascist one led to an acute ambivalence, says Schneider. Though all five women perceived the war from substantially different perspectives, each in her own way exposed and critiqued the seductive power of war and war stories, with their densely interwoven tropes of masculinity and nationalism. Yet these writers' conflicting impulses of loyalty to England and resistance to the war betray their ambivalence. Loving Arms will interest students of twentieth-century British literature and culture, gender studies, and narratology. Even today, we maintain an unabated love affair with the war story. But unless we listen to what the women had to say fifty years ago, we are doomed to hear only "the same old story."

Download or read book Wartime Broadcasting written by Mike Brown and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sat tensely at a microphone, using radio to declare that 'this country is at war with Germany'. During the ensuing wartime years, the BBC was the sole radio broadcaster in Britain, boosting morale through programmes such as 'ITMA' and 'Worker's Playtime'; helping the Home Front with useful hints and advice; transmitting government messages; and providing news. Personalities and stars became household names – Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, Ethel and Doris Walters, Mr Middleton – and their catchphrases could be heard everywhere. And yet, as this fascinating book explains, the BBC chose to avoid propaganda, and had to tread a fine line between what the people wanted to hear and what it was felt they should hear.

Download or read book Military History s Most Wanted written by M. Evan Brooks and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2002-05-30 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1944 U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Leslie J. McNair was accidentally killed by USAAF bombers that dropped their bombs short of the target, thus becoming the highest-ranking American casualty of World War II. Union Gen. Daniel Sickels was the first person to be successfully acquitted of murder by pleading temporary insanity after he shot and killed the son of "Star-Spangled Banner" composer Francis Scott Key in cold blood. Ten years before Custer's infamous last stand, U.S. cavalry Capt. William J. Fetterman disobeyed orders and led his eighty-man detachment in pursuit of a band of Sioux Indians. Neith.

Download or read book The 9 5mm Vintage Film Encyclopaedia written by Patrick Moules and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 1152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in both English and French, The 9.5mm Vintage Film Encyclopaedia provides a single-volume, comprehensive catalogue of all known 9.5mm film releases, including: Films: Comprising 12,460 individual entries, this A-Z reference index provides the main listing for each film and its origin where known, along with additional information including cast and crew, and cross references to other relevant material. People: This index of all known actors and film crew, comprising over 12,000 names, provides a listing which is cross referenced to the main entry for each original film they worked on. Numbers: Pathé-Baby/Pathéscope and other distributors’ catalogue numbers, film length, release dates (where known) and the series in which the films were organised, are set out in detail. With a foreword from eminent film historian and filmmaker, Keith Brownlow, this extensively researched text explains the importance of the 9.5mm film, from its beginnings in the early 1920s to becoming synonymous with Home Cinema throughout Europe. Readers will also find a brief technical explanation on how 9.5mm films were produced, along with relevant images.

Download or read book Time to Say Hello written by Katherine Jenkins and published by Orion. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The UK's biggest-selling classical artist reveals how her angelic voice has shot her to superstardom... Katherine Jenkins is an international singing superstar who has redefined a music genre: she has brought classical music to the masses and inspired young and old with her incredible voice, her glamorous looks and, above all, her love for music, her country and her fans. Born in Neath, South Wales, Katherine won national acclaim as the BBC Welsh Choirgirl of the year and soon after a place at the Royal Academy of Music. Auditioning for a terrifying panel of industry experts at Universal Music she came away with the largest recording deal in classical music history. And so began Katherine's meteoric rise to stardom. TIME TO SAY HELLO is Katherine's incredible story. Packed with laughter, adventure, heartbreak and music, it is the tale of a dream coming true and one that will keep you gripped to the last note ¿