Daniel Swift

A Motley Rubble

The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War

By

Bloomsbury 519pp £25 order from our bookshop

About two-thirds of the way through Lara Feigel’s new book, two of her five central characters find themselves in Vienna in the spring of 1948. Graham Greene was in the city to do research for the screenplay of The Third Man, while Elizabeth Bowen was on a British Council lecture tour. Both stayed in the same hotel, the Sacher, and they had dinner together one evening. ‘Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene did not have a close friendship,’ Feigel notes, but they were part of the gossipy, incestuous world of 1940s literary England, and a couple of months after that evening Bowen reviewed Greene’s new novel, The Heart of the Matter, with high praise in Tatler. It’s a nice coincidence, one of the many crossings that make up the structure for Feigel’s agreeable The Love-charm of Bombs.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • One woman 'travelled round the south of India with a retinue of 750 people, fourteen elephants, two racing camels f… ,
    • Stuck for a gift idea for Father's Day? Subscribe to Literary Review and get a FREE copy of 'An Impeccable Spy' –… ,
    • 'Gone. All gone. The ease, the pleasure, the effortless eloquence' From May 1995, Margaret Forster's withering rev… ,
    • RT : SO excited to tell you about this event! 😆 The amazing digital colourist, will be joining w… ,
    • 'Peters was unashamed and evidently unshamable, an impostor who wholly inhabited his fabrications and who indignant… ,
    • ‘At every waking moment Barbara Hepworth was aware of herself as a woman paving the way in a man’s world’ From the… ,
    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    Follow Us