Dimensions
137 x 215 x 27mm
The Wartime Diary Of Naomi Mitchison 1939 - 1945
Naomi Mitchison, Scotland's grand old lady of literature and celebrated left-wing political thinker, died in 1999 aged 101. Born into the intellectual Haldane family, she was a life-long socialist, champion of women's rights and honorary mother of a tribe in Botswana.
She spent most of the Second World War in the fishing village of Carradale on Kintyre, her home until her death. Her life was crowded with incident, and her attitudes to events were predictably forceful, original and honest. Throughout the war Naomi Mitchison kept a diary at the request of the social research organisation, Mass-Observation. From 1 September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, to 10 August 1945, when the Americans dropped the second atomic bomb, she recorded this picture of how one family and their friends lived, what they hoped for and what actually happened. What she wrote developed far beyond the confines of a social document.
Her diaries are written with the passion of a poet combined with the intellectual curiosity of a radical thinker. As such they provide a unique and invaluable document of the period.
