More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 4 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

“Nothing in my childhood stands so sharply etched in memory as this transition from peace to war, with its strange mixture of drama, pathos, anticlimax and near farce. Almost certainly at no other time did we as a family find ourselves so dependent on the wireless.” Based on diary entries, family letters, photography albums and newspaper cuttings, The Wireless in the Corner is the personal account of a boy brought up in London’s suburbia during the second quarter of the 20th century, the years English historian, Asa Briggs, called ‘the Golden Age of Broadcasting’. Drawing on his sharp visual and aural memory, author Alan Palmer recounts his early life as the only child of elderly parents living at Gants Hill in unfashionable Ilford. After a trip to Belgium, aged six, Alan became gripped by the events in Europe and observing international affairs became as much a hobby as collecting stamps. Listening to the wireless every evening, Alan’s childhood is as much a personalised political, social and military history as it is reminiscence. The Wireless in the Corner is written with the intention of recapturing the strain of the Blitz, and later of flying bombs and rockets, and the relieving moments of peace and contentment that were held so dear to the author. The book carefully distinguishes between what was known then and what readers know now, so as not to obscure events with thoughts based on present assumptions. Inspired by A. J. P Taylor, and similar to the work of Philip Ziegler and A. L. Rowse, The Wireless in the Corner will appeal to readers interested in military history and autobiographies. It will also appeal to those interested in life during the war.