Turner prefers to explore the lives of everyday actors, figures such as Henry Denton, an army officer who became a ballet dancer after being found ‘temperamentally unfit’ to fight by military tribunals.

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. Insightful and affecting account of the people whose lives and love lives have been forgotten since World War 2 - to the detriment of them and to us. 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. In this book, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history. 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 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. 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. The final 100 pages in particular beautifully synthesise personal experience and the untold queer context of the text. I thoroughly enjoyed this sensitive, at times tragic, story of love, lust, and sexual confusion among soldiers seaman and even air-aces of WWII.

The army which fought for the Allies was largely composed of conscripts who were not necessarily respectful of military mores and martial manners. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. It's the perfect riposte to any modern-day blowhard who makes sweeping claims about what our grandparents did or didn't fight for. He goes inside the machines of war and strips away uniform cloth to discover the true depth and complexity of men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire.Interestingly it mirrors post-war behaviours among some peace-time soldiery so, perhaps, it isn't only war which brings this to the foreground. He refuses their dismissal from memory and offers their testimonies as evidence that many were true innocents abroad. My fascination with uncontroversial classics – The Great Escape, Band of Brothers, Master and Commander – began to feel illicit, itchy, for reasons that seemed far less noble than my emerging anti-war politics.

And hooray to Luke Turner for producing a thought provoking and entertaining alternative to the Airfix model rendition of men at war. 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. 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.

I was 14 when I began to notice that my relationship with war stories had a different bent from those of my male relatives. 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.

This seemingly uncomfortable fit is heightened by the emergence of lad culture in the 90s and an increasingly jingoistic exhumation of the fallen soldiers for nationalistic and increasingly far-right causes. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.He spent hours painstakingly constructing models of his favourite aircraft, watching Sunday afternoon war films, pouring over stories of derring-do and relishing in birthday trips to air museums. As the Second World War recedes from living memory, critical reflections like this – about what we do with our inheritance, both the one we are given and the one we choose – stand to become all the more important. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Was also gratified to discover that the contents of Men at War were as amusing, thought provoking and imaginative as the event. In Men at War , Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history.