Perhaps, too, we are jealous of the resilience with which our parents and grandparents dealt with the ubiquity of death. A man was pulled out of the wreckage of the Café de Paris after a landmine hit it in March 1941 by someone who had touched him for a drink earlier in the evening. The bandleader Ken "Snakehips" Johnson was killed in the blast and much of his West Indian dance band with him. Yet this ghastly event was the provocation for Vaughan Williams's Symphony No 6, one of the great cultural products of the war, even though the composer denied it was a war symphony. We are nostalgic about the war because we sense it culminated in the triumph of life over death. Books such as this tell us that, in such a supposition, we are absolutely right.