National service: conscription in Britain, 1945-1963

A serious - if often very entertaining - attempt to get to grips with the reality of national service, an extraordinary institution which now seems as remote as the British Empire itself.

With great sympathy and curiosity, Richard Vinen unpicks the myths of the two 'gap years', which all British men who came of age between 1945 and the early 1960s had to fill with national service.