... demonstrate[s] well what we can learn and need to relearn about Britain’s People’s War.

... unusually informative and stimulating.

There’s a lot of this saga in Mr. Allport’s 450-page account—how could there not be?—but as one turns again and again to the evidence on offer in the endnotes (more than 60 pages of them), one has a growing sense that Britain at Bay is more than that—in fact, that it might be the single best examination of British politics, society and strategy in these four years that has ever been written. I use the word 'examination' here because the book is much more than a fine narrative account of great personalities and surface actions, of the history of events. It reaches to deeper levels—of geography and grand strategy, and wartime logistics, of shipping logistics and troop deployments.

Through examining these questions, Allport focuses on the human element, exploring how individuals’ lives contributed to and were impacted by the outcome of events.

Allport paints a rich and highly readable portrait of Britain in the 1930s.

[Allport] expertly sketches the cultural and social landscape of middle-class England in the 1930s.

... carries a modest whiff of revisionism.