The Love-charm of Bombs

From British critics:

“An absorbing and well-researched group biography of five prominent writers who responded imaginatively to the nightly routine of sirens and barrage . . . [She connects] the making of three classic English novels – Caught, The Heat of the Day and The End of the Affair – to the blitz, and through the lives of their authors unfolds a fascinating home front story. She persuasively demonstrates that London in 1941 sponsored all the sensations usually found on the battlefield . . . Feigel is particularly good on the erotic corollary to the blitz: wartime passion.”—Robert McCrum, The Guardian

“What was the sexiest place in the 20th Century? For a surprising number of people, the answer to that question would be ‘London during the Blitz’ . . . In The Love-charm Of Bombs, Lara Feigel homes in on five writers in wartime London . . . The Love-charm Of Bombs is full of good things, clearly expressed, and captures well the strange euphoria of war, and the equally unexpected sense of dreariness when it is over.”—Craig Brown, The Daily Mail

“[A] fine account of five writers involved in the civil defence of the city, but who ended up having to fight the fires blazing in their private lives . . . Intelligently written, seamlessly presented, and with something of the quality of a tapestry . . . Feigel demonstrates that the much-vaunted ‘London can take it’ spirit was less wholesome and more reckless: Londoners were also getting it. ‘It came to be rumoured,’ Elizabeth Bowen recalled, ‘that everybody in London was in love.’”—Nicholas Shakespeare, The Daily Telegraph

“Lara Feigel’s book takes five writers who spent most of their war in London and composes a group portrait of their lives and of a significant moment in our British collective culture – recent enough almost to touch, and yet so unlike our present. The result is deeply interesting, because Feigel is a good storyteller and responsive to the nuances of expression in the period . . . Feigel’s book reads partly as the record of a peak moment in the history of British adultery. Marriage was compromised, companionable, a bit despicable (a bit middle-class). Adultery, inside a system of strongly coded behaviours, could operate as a form of truth telling.” —Tessa Hadley, The Guardian

“At a time when many dons sterilise themselves in theory, defend their flimsy doctrines inside dense thickets of jargon, and are oblivious of human character or motive, Feigel writes with modesty and grace, never patronises or sentimentalises her subjects, and makes the reader glad to be sharing her ideas . . . The Love-charm of Bombs is a bounding success as an account of wartime London and as a study of highly strung but tough characters under stress, and of the way that novelists transmute adultery into great art. It evokes the inflamed skies, desolate streets, gashed buildings, broken windows, crushed or scorched corpses – and the ways that these stimulated novelists . . . Feigel’s chronicle sent me scurrying to read [Henry Green’s] Caught, and to revisit the others. They are as powerful and devastating as she promises. I haven’t for many a year read a book of literary scholarship with such impatience to know what happens next.” —Richard Davenport-Hines, The Telegraph