Naomi Mitchison, Scotland's grand old lady of literature and celebrated left-wing political thinker, kept a wartime diary at the request of Mass-Observation, a social research agency. From the day Hitler invaded Poland to the day America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, she recorded this picture of how one (extraordinary) family and their friends lived...and what actually happened. "She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which...comes by grace."--Times Literary Supplement. ..".as in a good novel, the people, their feelings and reactions are instantly recognizable and as fresh and immediate today as they were then."--Emma Tennant, Guardian.