Now, as an adult who has come to terms with a masculine identity and sexuality that is often erased from dominant military narratives, he undertakes a refreshingly honest analysis of his fascination with the war. Turner uses firsthand accounts by gay men such as Peter de Rome (who served in the Royal Air Force) and Quentin Crisp (who was rejected on account of ‘sexual perversion’) to demonstrate the variety of queer experiences during the war, and the need for nuanced study of those experiences. Nothing else I have read has come so close to elucidating what it is I mean when I say "I'm interested in the Second World War" and the conflicting feelings that come with that. But to keep ourselves on our toes, we have a rule that author gender is alternated, girl-boy-girl-boy, and the continents always rotated (with occasional glitches).

This certainly confirms his knowledge of the period and gives some historical colour and substance but if, like me, you aren't really interested in the engineering then it can be a bit of a struggle at times. Luke Turner is a bisexual man trying to reconcile his fascination with the machinery of WWII and his sexuality.He spent hours painstakingly constructing models of his favourite aircraft, watching Sunday afternoon war films, pouring over stories of derring-do and relishing in birthday trips to air museums. Insightful and affecting account of the people whose lives and love lives have been forgotten since World War 2 - to the detriment of them and to us. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. As someone who usually focusses on tales of WWI, and who finds WWII a little off-putting (in that main due to the reasons stated above) this book allowed me a whole new entry point to the period - one that isn't uncomfortable.

A book that asks questions and starts you thinking about people involved in war in a way I had never before.But the real strength of the book is in how it demonstrates the power of desire as a driving force: in intellectual curiosity, national myth-making and in writing history.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.More immediately, I was aware that the allure these characters had for many of the men in my life was due to the fact that they weren’t allowed to transgress the bounds of heterosexuality. Despite the richness of British masculinity studies and the pervasiveness of queer First World War poetry in British school curricula, Emma Vickers’ 2013 Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-45 remains one of the few academic monographs to consider queer men not just as a given in British histories of war, but as a distinct culture enabled by wartime mobilisation. As the conflict moves beyond living memory and the last veterans leave us, we are in danger of missing the opportunity to gain a true understanding of this rich history.

In Men at War , Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to recognise men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire. He gives a different and very personal insight into the long established "national narrative" about World War 2. When he moves on to recounting the lives of some of the men fighting in the War, often relating to their sexuality, the book is more interesting, but actually there isn't that much of this and its a rather small cast of characters.WWII is not the reserve of the Nigel Farages of this world (don't worry - he gets a namecheck in the closing chapters) or the Johnsons and they can't be allowed to hijack the image of what the war was and meant for those who lived and fought in it. Lying in bed beneath Airfix bombers and fighter planes suspended from his bedroom ceiling, he would often think about the men that might sit in their cockpits, and whether he could ever be one of them.