Here is Anthony Burgess’s copy of Bomber, by Len Deighton, published in 1970. In his guide to ‘the best in English since 1939’, Ninety-Nine Novels, Burgess, who of course took a minor part in the 1939-45 war himself, praises Deighton’s fictionalisation of the destruction wreaked on Germany for its immediacy, accuracy and plausibility. ‘Deighton’s gift is not Jamesian: he is weak on poetic prose and moral involutions, his technique is more documentary than novelistic. But he represents a new and important strain in contermporary fiction and is to be admired for his courage’. Also reportedly praised by Kingsley Amis, Bomber appears to have been recognised in a small way by writers who had been in the war themselves, and appreciated his attempt to render the enormous events of the war in fiction but with a high level of historical realism.

Will Carr

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