Sidney Bernstein, Baron Bernstein would help the new Allies, Britain and America, to understand each other. He read and advised on early drafts of "Mrs. Miniver" (1942), the film starring Greer Garson as the heroic mother of a wartorn British family, which MGM made after a meeting of MGM executives with Bernstein in Hollywood. As the invasion of France loomed, Bernstein brought his friend Alfred Hitchcock back from Hollywood to Britain to work on two short documentary films for the post-invasion French audience. As the war wound to its close, Bernstein heard the first reports of extermination camps, visited Belsen himself, and was determined
Mrs. Bridge The Believer, called "Mrs. Bridge" one of Connell's "three classics of Wasp repression" (the other two being the novels "Mr. Bridge" and "The Connoisseur"). American novelist James Patterson, who said "Mrs. Bridge" was the one novel that probably influenced him the most (Joshua Ferris is another admirer), said it and "Mr. Bridge" "capture the sadness, and boredom, of the unexamined life" and praises the compassion and precision of Connell's writing. British critic Matthew Dennison (who praised the "studiedly simple, undecorated prose, with few rhetorical flourishes") compared the main character to Jan Struther's Mrs. Miniver; both inhabit "an interwar world shaped