Acknowledgements

This book is in large part the product of conversations with many people over many years. The first debt of thanks is to Heather Jones, who has influenced this research more than anyone. Heather helped turn a vague idea during my master’s degree into a PhD and now into this book, and never stopped supporting me during the many years in between. I am grateful for her brilliance and friendship. My colleagues Antony Best and Matthew Jones have also been involved since this book was still a PhD project. They read early thesis chapters and the final draft of the book, and their comments have strengthened this work considerably.

Conversations with David Stevenson, Dina Gusejnova, William King, Joanna Lewis, David Motadel, Dan Todman and Neville Wylie among others have influenced my thinking and the content of this book. I am doubly grateful to Neville, whose advice on academia has played a significant role in my career, and for the same I also thank Patrick Dunleavy. This book further benefited from the collegiality of Svetozar Rajak and Tim Hochstrasser, with whom I had the pleasure of teaching while completing the final stages of writing. The administrative team of the LSE International History Department also deserve a million thanks for their help with a million tasks. Most of all at LSE, I am grateful to my students. Their takes on the twentieth century have shaped my thinking in more ways than they realise.

While much of my debt is to colleagues, without LSE’s financial support this research would neither have begun nor been completed; nor would it have been made available open access, and I am grateful to those involved in securing the relevant funding since 2015. Beyond LSE, I have benefited enormously from the knowledge and assistance of staff at The National Archives in Kew, where I spent an inordinate amount of time; a security guard at one point asked me if I worked there too, so that he could stop searching my bag every morning. I am also extremely grateful to those involved in the production of the book at Cambridge University Press, and especially so to Michael Watson, Rosa Martin and Beatrice Shooter for their support in progressing the manuscript to production.

I owe the greatest thanks to my friends (from whom I must single out Alice Park, who heard about the book much too often) and my family – especially Dan, Doina, Irene, Stella, my grandmother and my mum, whose parenting would have made Dad proud. Most of all, I am grateful to Ruxandra Serban, who made this long process, and so much else, brighter. I am fully aware that they would all have preferred a book on ancient Greece, theatre or food, and this may be the right moment to say that the next one will also be about the war.

My preoccupation with the Second World War is not just academic, however. It is also an attempt to understand how my late grandmother, Jean, and her generation experienced it. Her brother Frank left their beloved Sheffield to join RAF Bomber Command after witnessing the Sheffield Blitz. He was on a flight to Berlin that never returned home. It felt only right to dedicate this book to his memory and all it represents. Many people whose families were directly affected by the specific topic I study have reached out to me in recent years, particularly the grandchildren of those involved in interrogations at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School for refugees, about which I have written elsewhere. I am immensely grateful to them for sharing their personal histories with me. The stories of many of the people in this book are quite different from those refugee accounts. I have tried to present them as accurately as the record allows, mindful that they may be part of someone’s family history as much as they are a part of the war’s history.