Shirley Williams: Saving my mother from the scriptwriters

Shirley Williams sits at the head of a table in a large conference room in Lib Dem HQ. She will be 85 this year, but still has a finger in many a pie, most of which we’re not to talk about here, including the predicted wipe-out of a generation of her party’s MPs at this year’s election. It’s one of the reasons she never made it to see the Tower of London poppies. Too busy. She also had to dash to Russia where she is on the board of the Moscow School of Political Studies. ‘It is all about teaching people about democracy and has fallen under the frown of Mr Putin, which is why I had to go.’

What we’re here to talk about is her mother Vera Brittain, and the lives of the four young men Brittain chronicled in Testament of Youth, an unimprovable account of living through the Great War.