There are many ‘1940s’. For some it is and always will be the decade of the Second World War, and that conflict overshadows all other aspects of the period, not least because while hostilities ceased in 1945, the impact of the war continued to be felt – psychologically, emotionally and economically – in the state of the nation, the grief of its inhabitants and the pain of readjustment. For others, the 1940s is a beginning, not an end: the Cold War, immigration, the inception of the welfare state and the transformation of Britain as an imperial power. Yet the multiplicity of these 1940s is most often distilled into the crude division of 1945 and after. Studies of the century, whether literary or historical, concur with Jay Winter's argument that 1945 is the ‘real caesura in European cultural life’ of the twentieth century (1995/1998: 228). This book at once agrees with and challenges that assertion. Undoubtedly 1945 is a catastrophic year, etching European cultural memory with the indelible scars of the atomic bomb and what would later be termed the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the literary manifestation of such a ‘break’ is harder to pin down – it is a more diffuse production, the product of a nexus of temporal, historical, subjective and pragmatic considerations. The horror of 1945 is both anticipated and avoided by literature.