The Love-charm of Bombs, Restless Lives in the Second World War, by Lara Feigel

This book has a bizarre, somewhat tasteless title, but The Love-charm of Bombs, Restless Lives in the Second World War is an excellent chronicle of World War Two, seen through the eyes of five writers and their circles of friends and family. Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Henry Yorke (a.k.a. Henry Green) and the Austrian Hilde Spiel were all prominent writers in London at the time, and their work is testimony to the mood of the time.

These writers, firefighting, ambulance-driving, patrolling the streets, were the successors of the soldier poets of the First World War […]. Like the poets in the trenches, Bowen,  Greene, Macaulay and Yorke were participants rather than witnesses, risking death, night after night in defence of their city. The Second World War was a total war.  No one escaped the danger and every Londoner was vulnerable.  While the fighting in the First World War…