With its very personal perspective on the First World War, Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth proves enduringly affecting. As the title suggests, it does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of the conflict. She wrote to show what the Great War meant to her generation and “an impression of the changes which that period brought about in the minds and lives of very different groups of individuals belonging to the large section of middle-class society from which my own family comes”. She sought truth and hope from the “smashing up of my own youth”. It’s a narrative that takes her from clever schoolgirl to Oxford undergraduate to volunteer nurse in a few turbulent months. In bringing this story to the screen for the twenty-first century, directo