This terrific addition to the growing body of literature on the memory of the Second World War developed out of an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Brighton in 2011. It is an important volume that will be of interest to those interested in memory studies generally, in commemorations of the Second World War particularly, and in contemporary British culture more broadly. Each of the chapters can be read alone, yet the reader is strongly advised to read the volume as a whole, not only because of the richness and diversity of topics covered but also because, taken together, the chapters raise at least as many new questions as they answer (always a mark of a successful edited collection). The contributions point to a host of themes relating to the production and transmission of representations of the war and to the ligaments between commemorative practice and British culture.

The larger part of contributors examine a period during which the ways in which the war has been remembered were transforming in important ways, roughly from the mid-1980s until the present day. During those decades, an increasing number of women and men who never experienced war or its deprivations took part in the production of its cultural memory; a new political climate provided both a new context as well as new meanings to the imagined war experience (something explored, for instance, in Rebecca Brammall's chapter on the meanings of “austerity”); and forms of commemoration and remembrance were now generated by an expanding market and new technology. Interestingly, those very decades also witnessed a boom of memory studies, on which this volume builds and which Geoff Eley and the editors discuss in the forward and introduction, respectively. Janet Watson's study of the material culture of commemoration demonstrates the dramatic shifts in the nature of commemoration that took place between the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of the war. Her chapter, along with Juliette Pattison's study of the memory of the Special Operations Executive and its gendered iterations, points to what Eley emphasizes as the significance of visual practices to cultural memory. Various contributors note that with new technologies such as the Internet, the intersections of the private and the public also assumed new forms. By casting a wide net and looking for cultural memory wherever it could be found, the contributors have pointed to the multifaceted, and ever-shifting, nature of memory production.

At the same time, this collection sets against the vast changes in the forms of memory production and transmission the relative stability of certain hegemonic narratives about the war. Such continuities are most evident in those chapters that deal with personal articulation of memory. Lucy Noakes's compelling study of the People's War website, to which personal narratives were submitted around the millennium, demonstrates that for the most part the public expression of personal narratives widely conformed to representations that had been circulating for half a century. These depended, she argues, less on the seemingly democratic nature of the internet and more on what she sees as the “cultural circuit” (60) of production and reproduction of representations and memory. These findings sit well with those of Penny Summerfield, who conducted an intergenerational study of the ways in which the war is discussed, related to, or “remembered.” Summerfield has identified remarkable consistency across age groups (though not across genders), which she sees as the result of the “constant cultural renewal of the memory of ‘the war’” (40). In some cases the war has been, and perhaps continues to be, some kind of “extra live-in Great Aunt” (29), in the memorable words of one Mass Observation respondent. Even among much later generations, it seems, there have existed intimate links between normative gendered subjectivities and ways one ought to “remember” the war or relate to it.

Memory, however defined, is of course constantly contested, and it is to these contestations that the final two points are devoted. On the one hand, if the chapters mentioned here can be taken as a representative sample, it appears that in one way or another, a large number of contestations merely reaffirm existing hegemonic narratives (by merely demanding greater inclusion, for instance), or at any rate do not significantly challenge them. Corina Peniston-Bird's study of the opposition and reaction to the fiasco of memorial for the women of World War II suggests that hegemonic narratives regarding the meaning and nature of sacrifice, or the privileging of certain kinds of sacrifice, have shaped reactions that were otherwise contradictory in nature. The struggle of Bomber Command veterans for a memorial of their own, explored by Frances Houghton, points to similar conclusions regarding the nature of postwar contestations over memory and exclusion. The stubborn persistence of traditional narratives is further demonstrated by Wendi Ugolini's nuanced discussion of the memories of West Indian and Polish contributions on the home front, which, unlike its military counterpart, is still imagined as entirely British and white. Ugolini concludes that “members of both groups have also engaged in positivist official representations” (104) that reaffirm, rather than challenge, dominant representations of the war. Yet, as these contributors also suggest, the archives, broadly understood, are loaded with memories and representations that do complicate conventional pictures. This point is the subject of Martin Francis's insightful evocation and reading of two half-forgotten war movies that engaged, rather than avoided, the intricate links between war, race, and empire. He concludes with a suggestion, or rather challenge, that the historian should seek those roads that, for whatever reason, have remained hidden from view, for they may offer exciting ways to engage or disrupt the dominant narratives that shape the cultural memory of the war. The studies presented in this volume, then, offer both significant contributions to our understanding of the state of the field and how we can make sense of the cultural memory of the war, as well as an excellent starting point for investigations to come.