The familiar narrative of the war — useless Britain, the world's best German army beaten only because Hitler was mad — is an artefact of how the world looked in the 1970s and 1980s, not of how it looked in 1939.

British historian and writer specialising in the Second World War

And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.