National service - Richard Vinen

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.

Richard Vinen is Professor of History at King's College, London and the author of a number of major books on 20th century Europe. He won the Wolfson Prize for History for his last book, National Service.

Vinen's clever and careful book is surely the definitive history. The era of national service now seems like ancient history, but from the routines of the parade ground to the horrors of Korea, Vinen restores it to life with a searching eye for detail and impressive human sympathy
Sunday Times BOOKS OF THE YEAR - Dominic Sandbrook

Written with compassion and insight, Vinen's book brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of postwar Britain
Financial Times BOOKS OF THE YEAR - Tony Barber

National Service may prove to be the most original social history book of 2014. The book is bigger than its ostensible subject, embracing class, masculinity, sexuality, compliance, rebellion, combat atrocities, petty crime, notions of national identity, group solidarity, the fallibility of memory and what it means to be a man
Guardian - Richard Davenport-Hines

Vinen has given us the kind of book that every professional historian surely wants to write: not only with a mastery of its voluminous original sources but also a sensitivity to the rich human detail, by turns authoritative, thoughtful, poignant - and funny
Financial Times - Peter Clarke

I can't recall ever having read so unexpectedly fascinating a book...every single page has something of great interest on it
The Guardian - Nicholas Lezard