When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was
transformed overnight into a battlefront. For most Londoners, the
sirens, guns, planes and bombs heralded grueling nights of
sleeplessness, fear and loss. But for Graham Greene and some of his
contemporaries, this was a bizarrely euphoric time when London became
the setting for intense love affairs and surreal beauty. At the height
of the Blitz, Greene described the bomb-bursts as holding one 'like a
love-charm.' As the sky whistled and the ground shook, nerves were
tested, loyalties examined and infidelities begun.
The Love-charm of Bombs is a powerful wartime chronicle told through
the eyes of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose
Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and Henry Yorke (writing as Henry Green).
Volunteering as ambulance drivers, fire-fighters and ARP wardens, these
were the successors to the soldier poets of the First World War and
their story has never been told. Now, opening with a meticulous
evocation of a single night in September 1940, Lara Feigel brilliantly
and beautifully interweaves letters, diaries and fiction with official
civil defense records to chart the history of a burning world in wartime
London and post-war Vienna and Berlin. She reveals the haunting,
ecstatic, often wrenching stories that triumphed amid the mess of a
war-torn world.
