ABSTRACT
This is not so much a history book as a book about history. It dwells in particular on the relationship between academic history and popular memory – by which I mean the things that people implicitly believe rather than what historians tell them. Broadly, I have three aims: the first is to describe the pre-war myth of 1940 – what people expected the next war to be like; the second is to deal with the construction of the myth/s of 1940 during the war itself; the third aim is to trace the changing construction of what 1940 and the war have come to mean in the subsequent sixty years.
