Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945

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He gives a different and very personal insight into the long established "national narrative" about World War 2. Turner cites Derek Jarman’s film War Requiem, an adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s 1962 opera (in turn based on Wilfred Owen’s poetry) as a life-changing encounter with ‘a portrait of Britishness that was a safety net for someone trying to untangle ideas of patriotism and desire’. Turner's writing has matured since "Out of the Woods", but it retains a youthful freshness and sincerity. Turner uses his own cultural memory of the war – from his grandfather’s religiously motivated conscientious objection, to a childhood fascination with planes – as signposts for a deeper enquiry into the lives and sexualities of perhaps the most celebrated generation of British men.

Men at War is a thoughtful, empathetic and necessary examination of the impact of the Second World War on British culture. Turner strips away the hero worship, the bravado and veneer of 'derring do' to show us some very human portraits of men at war. This book is full of stories that intriguingly, lustfully and hilariously complicates Britain's cosy and homogenous national myth about how people in that era acted, thought and felt. Was also gratified to discover that the contents of Men at War were as amusing, thought provoking and imaginative as the event. I have to admit I'm a fan of this style of social history and the unapologetic rewriting of History with a capitol H.An intensely personal examination of manliness and sexuality in WW2 by a man who comes clean about his lingering Airfix habit. Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back.

During a battlefield tour school trip, he experienced the agony of sleeping in a bunk just feet away from his teenage crush, hoping for contact while surrounded by a history that fascinated him. As an adult historian of war and queerness, I came to understand better the tension between popular war narratives and the ones I sensed below the surface as a teenager: they tell seemingly contradictory stories about what it means to be a man.Armed with the knowledge of a war aficionado, Turner cements his seat at the table alongside those who might resist his queer narrative of World War II. Luke Turner's tender account of servicemen's transgressive private lives, transforms our understanding of the Second World War . Jack Doyle is Departmental Lecturer in LGBTQ+ history at the University of Oxford and Managing Editor of the British Journal for Military History.

The title to be read and discussed is sign-posted and on sale for the whole of the previous month (with a discount for those who make it known they intend to come) and everybody is welcome, whether first-timer, part-timer or regular-timer.

As the conflict moves beyond living memory and the last veterans leave us, we are in danger of missing the opportunity to gain a true understanding of the rich humanity that lies beyond the myths, machines and iconography. Windows users should also consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge, or switching to Firefox or Chrome. Was left with a strong desire to seek out more history books that come at their subject with an unconventional angle as some of the uncovered material humanises and brings to life its subjects in a really startling way. I stayed up late rewinding a brief, tender conversation between two sailors, furtive and embarrassed as though I were watching porn.

Lying in bed beneath Airfix fighter planes suspended from his ceiling, he would think about the men that might sit in their cockpits, and whether he could ever be one of them. But the real strength of the book is in how it demonstrates the power of desire as a driving force: in intellectual curiosity, national myth-making and in writing history.More immediately, I was aware that the allure these characters had for many of the men in my life was due to the fact that they weren’t allowed to transgress the bounds of heterosexuality. I was 14 when I began to notice that my relationship with war stories had a different bent from those of my male relatives. Despite the richness of British masculinity studies and the pervasiveness of queer First World War poetry in British school curricula, Emma Vickers’ 2013 Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-45 remains one of the few academic monographs to consider queer men not just as a given in British histories of war, but as a distinct culture enabled by wartime mobilisation. Turner uses firsthand accounts by gay men such as Peter de Rome (who served in the Royal Air Force) and Quentin Crisp (who was rejected on account of ‘sexual perversion’) to demonstrate the variety of queer experiences during the war, and the need for nuanced study of those experiences. WWII is not the reserve of the Nigel Farages of this world (don't worry - he gets a namecheck in the closing chapters) or the Johnsons and they can't be allowed to hijack the image of what the war was and meant for those who lived and fought in it.