Juliet Nicolson

On Boxing Day 1962, when Juliet Nicolson was eight years old, the snow began to fall. It did not stop for ten weeks. It wasn't just the weather that was bad. The threat of nuclear war had reached its terrifying height with the recent Cuban Missile Crisis. Unemployment was on the rise, de Gaulle was blocking Britain from joining the European Economic Community, Winston Churchill, still the symbol of Great Britishness, was fading.

And yet underneath the frozen surface, new life was beginning to stir and when the thaw came, ten weeks of extraordinary weather had acted as a catalyst between two distinct eras. 

From poets to pop stars, shopkeepers to schoolchildren, and her own family's experiences, Juliet Nicolson traces the hardship of that frozen winter and the emancipation that followed. That spring, new life was unleashed, along with freedoms we take for granted today.

Peace at last, after Lloyd George declared it had been 'the war to end all wars', would surely bring relief and a renewed sense of optimism? But this assumption turned out to be misplaced as people began to realise that the men they loved were never coming home.

All families have their myths and historian Juliet Nicolson’s is no different. Here she takes us through seven generations of women, from the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siècle Washington DC, an English boarding school during the Second World War, to Chelsea in the 1960s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from.

Events of the record breaking hot summer of 1911 are seen through the eyes of a number of individuals: a trade unionist, a butler, a debutant, a politician, a choirboy and the new queen, Mary.