AUNTIE’S WAR
THE BBC DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR
EDWARD STOURTON Doubleday, 432pp, £20, Oldie price £13.14 inc p&p
‘Through it all – the miracle of the BBC’S wartime story – runs a golden thread of truth-telling,’ argues Stourton. In this ‘fascinating, complex and exhaustively researched’ book, wrote Juliet Nicolson in the
Spectator, Stourton ‘studies documents marked “secret”, memos about broadcasters not to be trusted, and scripts scrawled with the censor’s tut-tutting’. For Nicolson the book ‘travels far beyond the bomb-scarred walls of Broadcasting House, bringing the reader as it did the 1940s listening public, the drama and immediacy of the war, and eventually the reality of a post-nazi world, where Dimbleby’s pared down description of the liberation of Belsen must be one of the most shattering pieces ever broadcast’. Reviewing it for the Times, Lawrence James found it to be ‘an engaging, balanced and thoroughly researched history. It is often a moving and amusing tale containing plenty of mavericks and
colourful episodes’. Brian Morton, in his review for the Glasgow Herald, took a slightly sceptical line. ‘If ever there were a time when impartiality was at a justifiable discount, it was during the Second World War,’ he wrote. ‘That doesn’t mean that Stourton’s affectionate insider’s view is uncritical but it tends to accept the BBC’S complicity with those in power as a given rather than a dereliction.’ Otherwise, he found ‘moments when one wonders whether Stourton, who started his BBC career sub-editing broadcast copy, has read the list of “hints” he quotes, with its strictures on indirect constructions, intransitive verbs, long sentences and foreign terms; but for the most part he tells a brisk and fascinating story’.