National Service

Richard Vinen

£10.99

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Penguin Books Ltd
2 July 2015
ISBN: 9780141399805
Paperback
640 pages

From the publisher

Winner of the Templer Medal and the Wolfson History Prize

Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller


Richard Vinen's National Service is a serious - if often very entertaining - attempt to get to grips with the reality of that extraordinary institution, which now seems as remote as the British Empire itself. With great sympathy and curiosity, Vinen unpicks the myths of the two 'gap years', which all British men who came of age between 1945 and the early 1960s had to fill with National Service.

This book is fascinating to those who endured or even enjoyed their time in uniform, but also to anyone wishing to understand the unique nature of post-war Britain.