Sucking Eggs

Recycling, buying locally-sourced food and vintage clothing, checking air miles and carbon footprints - our ever-growing obsessions with saving money and preserving the planet is beginning to affect the way many of us shop, travel and eat every day. After decades of plenty, we now face the credit crunch and climate change but the good news is that we don't have to look far back in our history for a handy lesson in making seismic lifestyle changes. Our grannies can show us the way. They wasted almost nothing, bought locally, recycled, grew their own veg and 'dug for victory' and, with the aid of Patricia Nicol's colourful, comparative history, so can we.

Ambitious and systematic... she has made a serious study of government-imposed austerity in the Forties, Charming and perceptive romp through the ration books... Much of the book's fun is in the deft way Nicol weaves together examples of can-do thrifty propaganda. She has trawled the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives and come up with some gems, Fascinating slice of social history... With painstaking research, a good helping of north-east commonsense and glorious illustrations taken from Ministry of Information posters from the 1930s and '40s, she demonstrates how this generation could learn a lot from the self-sacrifice and austerity of the war years, A fascinating book, A comparative history of rationing, 'making do' and the environmentally-friendly lessons we can learn from those post-war years

Patricia Nicol is a journalist. She was born in Aberdeen in 1971, and brought up in Scotland, the UAE, England and Brazil. She studied English at the University of York and newspaper journalism at Cardiff Journalism School, University of Wales. As a journalist she has worked for the Aberdeen Press and Journal, the Scotsman and the Sunday Times, where she was deputy editor of Culture. She lives in London.