When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the social research organization Mass-Observation invited members of its national panel, used to answering regular questionnaires about aspects of their everyday lives, to send in war diaries in monthly installments. As James Hinton recounts, over a quarter of the initial 400 participants went on to provide extensive accounts of their lives over several years, with some continuing well after the war. In telling the stories of nine of these diarists, Hinton makes important contributions not only to the growing body of work on Mass-Observation and the field of life writing, in general, but also to twentieth-century British historiography.

While Mass-Observation has long been recognized as one of the key archival sources for researching the social history of the wartime years, the diaries have remained used as little more than a source of illustrative color. In making his case for remedying this neglect, Hinton notes the unique specificity of the diaries: “Mass-Observation offered a discipline and a context which transcended the purely private, meeting a need to frame individual quests in relation to larger public purposes” (6). Therefore, he argues, the diaries “take us as close as a historian can hope to get to observe selfhood under construction” (7), and, in particular, they reveal the everyday unfolding of what, following the work of Charles Taylor, Hinton takes as the central process of modernity: the radical disembedding of individual subjectivity from received sources of meaning.

The book's structure, which begins with five chapters on individual women diarists, then two on men, and a final chapter on a couple who were both Mass-Observers, reveals the gendering of these subjective processes. In particular, Hinton highlights the fifth of his female diarists, Lillian Rogers, who lived in a working-class district of Birmingham and was married to a garage mechanic, as the “‘exemplary pioneer' of the ‘open horizons of late modernity’” (112). Having used her knowledge of the work of Havelock Ellis to organize a sexually fulfilling relationship with her husband, Lillian was able to flirt tantalizingly with other men in a way that afforded her power in the public sphere, especially in the local streets and dance halls she frequented, ostensibly in the interest of reporting on popular leisure pastimes for Mass-Observation. At the same time, she was an ardent reader of popular psychology and a member of various study and writing groups including the Birmingham Ethical Society. As Hinton concludes, in her interests and outlook she was the exact counterpart of the nineteenth-century flaneur, only of the twentieth century and neither male nor bourgeois: “More than any of the other diarists, Lillian's restless exploration of multiple identities pointed the way towards a modern reflexive selfhood” (134).

The contrast of experience between the genders is shown most acutely in the last chapter, which counterpoints the wartime politicization of Bertha Walton with the simultaneous depoliticization of her schoolteacher husband, Matthew. While the latter increasingly came to find the totalitarian atmosphere of war inimical to the political and aesthetic pleasures of the prewar Popular Front culture that he had formerly found so stimulating, a whole new world of factory work and trade unionism opened up for Bertha, who broke boundaries by becoming an AEU shop steward. As Hinton takes pains to show, it was Bertha's continued commitment to public life that kept Matthew from a complete retreat into disillusion. Although her job finished with the end of the war in Europe, and the couple subsequently adopted a child, the point is established that their particular postwar retreat from political commitment into private life cannot simply be subsumed into the general realignment following the end of the war in the face of the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The fact that the two followed a different, gendered, route through the wartime experience but still remained mutually supportive is a precursor of the more democratic society that eventually emerged in the later years of the twentieth century. The less deferential and less hierarchical society that emerged in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s “founded on autonomous individuals aspiring to relate to one another in egalitarian ways” (8) was, for Hinton, rooted in the democratic nature of companionate marriages like that of the Waltons, which he portrays as one of the chief outcomes of the variety of stratagems and subtle ways by which women established equality and autonomy in the private sphere during the decades between the great public campaigns of the suffragettes and the women's liberation movement.

However, although Hinton clearly wants to acknowledge the importance of companionate marriages and hints that one lies behind the story of his own life, he is far too good a historian to undermine his own argument concerning the overarching importance of the individual specificity of the Mass-Observation diaries. As he states boldly in his introduction: “These are biographical essays not ‘case studies' narrowly designed to sustain a particular theory or test a particular hypothesis” (20). The implications of this argument, which is implicitly an attack on a narrow politics of representation, may well prove even more valuable in the long run than the historical content. Hinton is ultimately celebrating the capacity of individuals, with all their contradictory behavior and improbable beliefs—what he terms their “eccentricity” (199)—to make history while going about their everyday lives. This capacity can be seen as much in Lillian's dance hall flirtations as Bertha's trade union activism, and the factor that united both of these sets of activities and helped them contribute to social change was the self-reflexivity generated by the practice of writing about these lives for Mass-Observation. Therefore, it is a genuine shame that Oxford has not included the subtitle of Nine Wartime Lives on the cover, because Hinton's foremost achievement is to show the role of Mass-Observation in the making of the modern self; the book deserves to be acknowledged in this respect and allowed the chance to inspire further work in this field.