Achtung Schweinehund!

A brilliantly funny and nostalgic look at 1960s and 70s childhood as well as a more serious examination of boy's (and some men's) obsession with war. 'Achtung Schweinehund' is about men and war. Not real war but war as it has filtered down to us through toys, comics, games and movies. It is about blokes who spend their leisure time dressing as Vikings, applying transfers to 1/32nd scale plastic models of armoured personnel carriers or re-fighting El Alamein with stacks of cardboard counters. Take a journey into a darkened backroom where men can identify 376 different WW2 camouflage patterns; a world where the apparent polar extremes of masculinity - brutal violence and the obsessive desire to memorise code numbers and create acronyms - co-exist peacefully in an atmosphere rich with the hallucinogenic fumes of polystyrene cement, cellulose thinners and bright orange corn-based snack foods. This is a book for any man who can't smell enamel paint without thinking of the Airfix 8th Army set. Or for any woman who has ever asked herself why the first thing most boys make from Lego is a sub-machine gun.