Where Stands a Wingèd Sentry

When it comes to the British Home Front during WWII, the Blitz gets all the attention. As a Blitz-Lit lover myself, I won’t deny its historical dazzle. But having just finished this diary, kept during the summer after Dunkirk—when Brits reasonably thought they could be invaded and even lose the war—I see why the “quiet” can be just as fascinating as the “storm.” A published historian, as well as a famous novelist at the time, Kennedy had a keen sense for detail, dialogue, and geopolitics. But she was also a mother to three children, and she discovered that the qualities that make her diary so compelling were not as practical as the staunch sentiments of her less “imaginative” fellow citizens. Her account has eerie echoes of the year we just endured: she penetrates the amorphous dread that arises when nothing too extraordinary is happening except History-with-a-capital-H. (And she manages to be really funny too.)