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. When he moves on to recounting the lives of some of the men fighting in the War, often relating to their sexuality, the book is more interesting, but actually there isn't that much of this and its a rather small cast of characters. For a while, the Second World War provided me with an escape from my peers, with my weak body, physical ineptitude, and confused sexuality’, Turner reflects: ‘but I was starting to feel like I was nothing like this generation who were held up as heroes.

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. 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 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.

The self absorption has been replaced by healthy reflection, and there's a generosity towards the people who might sneer at his alleged sullying of their precious myth of British masculinity forged in the cauldron of war. Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back. Turner fearlessly interrogates the war-obsession of 1970s boyhoods and unearths some extraordinary testimonies and stories from the frontlines. Comparing British memory of the war with that of other countries, Turner asks why British soldiers are not remembered alongside Japanese and German men as potential perpetrators of sexual violence, despite evidence of these crimes during the Allied occupation of Germany and postwar colonial uprisings. He spent hours watching Sunday war films, poring over stories of derring-do and relishing in birthday trips to air museums.

A brilliant piece of writing which ALSO gave me a handy shortlist of WWII fiction/memoir to continue my reading. I have to admit I'm a fan of this style of social history and the unapologetic rewriting of History with a capitol H.