Lucilla Andrews is one of those authors about whom the Romantic Novelists’ Association “feels warm and fuzzy” (Jane Austen is another). So warm and fuzzy that, in August 2006, the association presented her with a lifetime achievement award in Edinburgh, the city she lived in for many years until her death at the age of 86 in October that year.

But for me it was not the novels – with titles such as Flowers from the Doctor, The Light in the Ward and Nurse Errant – that drew me into Andrews’ world of white-coated doctors and bustling nurses. Rather it was, in the course of research for my book Wartime: Britain 1939-1945, that I came across her autobiography, No Time for Romance, first published in 1977, years after she had become well-known as a romantic novelist. Here, I found detailed and vivid descriptions of life on the wards during the second world war, of nursing the survivors of Dunkirk and the victims of air raids and V1 and V2 attacks, as compelling as any diary or memoir in an archive. And so when, in spring 2006, I was asked to act as the historical consultant to the film being made of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, one of the sources I chose to recapture those gruelling years was No Time for Romance. [This was also one of the sources McEwan cites as having informed his understanding of the period and, famously, it was the book that McEwan was accused and swiftly absolved of plagiarising.]