The second world war stung Britain like a wasp. It was a stimulus and an endurance. On the home front or on service abroad, there was action and the fear of death. The Blitz concentrated the mind wonderfully. The arts flowered, poetry and painting, cinema and dancing. 'I would rather have been in London under siege between 1940 and 1945 than anywhere else,' John Lehmann said. 'except perhaps Troy in the time that Homer celebrated.'
Then came a terrible victory with the knowledge of atom bomb and concentration camp. The post-war years of austerity prolonged rationing and deprivation until the end of the Forties. The arts that had bloomed now withered and dispersed. A myth grew of a lost decade, when we had won a war, lost a peace and not done much else and not much good. In fact, these were the years of the best work of Henry Moore and Francis Bacon, of TS Eliot and George Orwell, of Noel Coward and Laurence Olivier. It was a decade of miraculous invention.
In this sweeping and important book, Andrew Sinclair recreates the world of the Forties with its encounters and its characters, its conflicts and its discoveries, its hopes and its disillusions. It was a world of pubs and clubs, where scarce drink could be found and the war forgot. It was the time of the short piece, the poem, the story and the sketch. Anyone who knew anyone in the loose coterie of Fitzrovia that took over from Bloomsbury could have anything published. Everything printed was read by a nation avid for learning and waiting for action.
War Like A Wasp recreates a feverish and democratic time using the words of the period. In his original and witty account of the decade, Andrew Sinclair has made sure that nobody will ever think of the Forties in the same way again.