National Treasures : Saving The Nation’s Art in World War II
‘Geeks triumph over the forces of darkness: nothing could have given me greater pleasure. Combining an exciting story with scrupulous research, Caroline Shenton has done her unlikely heroes proud’ – Lucy Worsley
As Hitler prepared to invade Poland during the sweltering summer of 1939, men and women from across London’s museums, galleries and archives formulated ingenious plans to send the nation’s highest prized objects to safety. Using stately homes, tube tunnels, slate mines, castles, prisons, stone quarries and even their own homes, a dedicated bunch of unlikely misfits packed up the nation’s greatest treasures and, in a race against time, dispatched them throughout the country on a series of top-secret wartime adventures.
National Treasures highlights a moment from our history when an unlikely coalition of mild-mannered civil servants, social oddballs and metropolitan aesthetes became the front line in the heritage war against Hitler. Caroline Shenton shares the interwoven lives of ordinary people who kept calm and carried on in the most extraordinary of circumstances in their efforts to save the Nation’s historic identity.
- Publisher: John Murray (27 Oct. 2022)
- Language: English
- Paperback
- 336 pages
- ISBN-10: 1529387450
- ISBN-13: 978-1529387452
- Dimensions: 12.7 x 2.29 x 19.69 cm
About the author;
Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 and Mary Beard called it ‘microhistory at its absolute best’ while Dan Jones considered it ‘glorious’. Its acclaimed sequel, Mr Barry’s War was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as ‘a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful’. In 2017, Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library. Her third book, National Treasures, was published in November 2021. You can fallow Caroline on Twitter @dustshoveller and sign up for her author newsletter on her website at www.carolineshenton.co.uk/news.
