Alan AllportBritain 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.
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
