1. Rupert Brooke, The Complete Poems, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1946).

2. Although such distinctions between writers are often highly arbitrary, as the essays collected in Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid’s High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) illustrate to good effect, they were held with considerable force, particularly among those who wished to maintain a sense of cultural superiority in the face of mass culture. A belief in the innate superiority of the intelligentsia could, however, also lead to some questionable affiliations, as John Carey argued in his study The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber, 1992).

3. Madeleine Bunting, The Plot: A Biography of My Father’s English Acre (London: Granta, 2010).

4. Juliet Gardiner, The Blitz: The British Under Attack (London: Harper, 2011), xv.

5. When he attended the Potsdam Conference a mere two days after becoming Prime Minister, Clement Atlee was asked by a clearly bemused Stalin to account for Churchill’s defeat. “One should distinguish between Mr Churchill the leader of the nation in the war and Mr Churchill the Conservative Party leader,” he answered, although that distinction was not one that could be reflected in an electoral poll. Cited in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 78.

6. Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (London: Granta, 2008), 51.

7. Ina Habermann, Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), 7.

8. Ibid., 6.

9. The reader will by now have noted that this study speaks of England whereas some of the material used refers to Britain. This is not an oversight but a recognition that in much of the propaganda of the war years and in the reformist work that preceded it, the word Britain was used to evoke and maintain a more cohesive sense of national identity. When one looks more closely at the actual content of such books and posters, however, it becomes clear that, with a few regional exceptions, the reference points upon which this sense of Britishness was constructed are actually English