[1] His father was Ritchie Calder (1906–1982), a noted socialist and pacifist who became famous for his work as a journalist and science writer.

[2] Together Addison and Calder made extensive use of the newly discovered archives of Mass-Observation to examine British public opinion.

[3] Calder had been commissioned to write a general history of the British Home Front by the publisher Jonathan Cape while still working on his PhD thesis.

[4][5] As Addison summarised: In order to wage the war, Angus argued, the prewar ruling class had been compelled to mobilize the people.

It became the People's War, a 'ferment of participatory democracy', exemplified by the way in which Londoners, acting in defiance of the government, had turned underground tube stations into deep shelters.

Richard Eyre said that he "could name about twenty works, films, television and theatre which have emerged essentially from Angus Calder's book".

In 1971, he moved to Edinburgh where he published Russia Discovered, a survey of 19th-century Russian fiction in 1976, and, three years later, became staff tutor in arts with the Open University.

[8] Calder became a ubiquitous figure on the Scottish literary scene writing essays and articles, books on Byron and T. S. Eliot, and working as editor of collections of poetry and prose.

He also wrote introductions to new publications of such diverse works as Great Expectations, Walter Scott's Old Mortality, T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy and James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson.

[9] In 1997 he edited Time to Kill — the Soldier's Experience of War in the West 1939–1945 with Paul Addison; Scotlands of the Mind (2002); Disasters and Heroes: On War, Memory and Representation (2004); and Gods, Mongrels and Demons: 101 Brief but Essential Lives (2004), a collection of potted biographies of "creatures who have extended my sense of the potentialities, both comic and tragic, of human nature".

[11] In the closing weeks of his life, the poet Richard Berengarten, together with his son Gideon Calder edited a collection of writing and sketches for and about him, which appeared just after his death.