HE awkwardly named Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring by Dame Laura Bright became the most widely publicised painting of a female factory employee and is one of many placed under spotlight in this fascinating examination of British war art during the Second World War.

Author and academic Brian Foss delves deeply into what art meant to Britain and its people at a time when the nation's very survival was under threat. After 1943 it became mandatory for women up to the age of 30 to work, and 7.25 million, including 48 per cent of those with children, were engaged in war-related labour.

The War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), which commissioned an army of artists, showed Ruby being equally at home in industry as any man. An employee of the Royal Ordnance factory in Monmouth where her family had relocated after being bombed out of London, she became the first woman to master the tricky task of preparing the breech ring component of the Bofors breech gun. Any mishap in this precise operation could result in a violent backblow when the gun was fired. According to the WAAC text, it was so difficult to achieve the necessary exactitude that men of exceptional ability usually performed the job. Ruby had the added cache of having come from a humble background - she had been a tobacconist's assistant before the factory - and she hailed from Wales, so was representative of the whole country. The author has packaged extensive archival material supported by some 200 hundred illustrations into a highly readable book. He focuses closely on Sir Kenneth Clark's influential WAAC and explores topics ranging from censorship to artists' finances. The book has an academic slant, but is equally accessible to a wide readership. It's a refreshing study of British art and cultural history.