In IMAGINATION AT WAR Adam Piette looks at the two faces of British wartime culture from 1939-1945. Behind the theatrical facade of public nostalgia and glorification he finds the private experience of the war to be disjointed, complex and a dark one where the British imagination reveals a broken and disaffected world where the war is seen as unreal and remote. Looking closeley at writers such as Alun Lewis, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, Piette captures the private reaction to the war in Britain and the book acts as a corrective to those who feel that the '39-'45 conflict takes second place to the First World War in terms of literary output and value.