'As in a good novel, the people, their feelings and reactions are instantly recognisable and as fresh and immediate today as they were then' GUARDIAN

'She writes vividly and movingly' DAILY TELEGRAPH

26th September 1939. I am beginning to wonder whether the point of a place like this may be that it will keep alive certain ideas of freedom which might easily be destroyed in the course of this totalitarian war...

Born in Edinburgh, Naomi Mitchison spent most of the Second World War in the fishing village of Carradale on Kintyre, her home until her death aged 101. Her life was crowded with incident, and her attitudes to events predictably forceful, original and honest.

Throughout the war she kept a diary at the request of the research organisation Mass Observation, in which she recorded both the momentous events of the time, and also how one (albeit extraordinary) family and their friends lived, what they hoped for and what actually happened. Her diaries developed far beyond the confines of a social document.

Written with the passion of a poet combined with the intellectual curiosity of a radial thinker, they provide a unique and valuable document of the period.

Originally published: London: Gollancz, 1985.

She writes enviably, with the kind of apparently casual precision which, though it can be achieved by effort, far more often comes by grace