Life during the Blitz: Death threats The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War. By Lara Feigel. Bloomsbury; 519 pages; $35 and £24.99. FEW histories of the British home front during the second world war really capture the "mood, temper and climate," lamented Elizabeth Bowen, a novelist who lived in London at the time. Death's constant threat fuelled an apocalyptic hedonism. The Blitz was grim (more than 40,000 people died), but glorious too, in its way. In addition, the experience left a distinct and enduring literary legacy, writes Lara Feigel, an academic at King's College London, in her new book, "The Love-charm of Bombs," which came out in Britain in February and is now being published in America. A fast-living writing trio - Bowen, Graham Greene and Henry Yorke (pen-name Henry Green) - are the main protagonists. They mucked in with the war effort, but their Blitz was made unique by love affairs. The passions it aroused, and the sense of timelessness that ensued - a "suspended present," Ms Feigel calls it - were fertile muses. "These writers, firefighting, ambulance-driving, patrolling the streets, were the successors of the soldier poets of the first world war," the author argues in her introduction. Bomb-hit London was surely of a different order to the peerless carnage of Flanders fields, but the literary impact of the war, she convincingly shows, is comparable. Yorke was at his most prolific then. For the others the experience bore fruit more slowly. The Blitz would provide the setting for Bowen's "The Heat of the Day" (1948), and also for Greene's most passionate work, "The End of the Affair" (1951). Peace was a disappointment. The democratic spirit ebbed and life lost its intensity. Bowen, repelled by the Labour Party's 1945 election victory, retreated to Ireland with her sexless husband, but really she lived in a world of letters with a Canadian lover. Yorke, who would never be more than a "writer's writer's writer," became a drunk. Greene found new love and increased fame, but like the others, Ms Feigel suggests, he would never again "value the present moment so wholeheartedly." This is a strikingly original book. It succeeds in its ambitious combination of group biography and literary criticism. But it is not flawless. Ms Feigel focuses too widely on obscure novelists, in particular a melancholy Austrian émigré, Hilde Spiel, while more illustrious contemporaries - Virginia Woolf, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh - haunt the background like ghosts at the feast. The authors are also too readily believed. Yorke called his fellow firefighters "absolute heroes," but Waugh, a marine, doubted their courage. Did Waugh have a point? The question goes unasked. But these are minor complaints. For the ageing Rose Macaulay, another British novelist of the period, the war was shattering. She lost a secret lover to cancer, and his letters to a bomb. The need to conceal the mourning deepened the grief. "The Love-charm of Bombs" excels in demonstrating that these years of bleakness and loss were also, for a fortunate few, a time of extraordinary excitement and literary inspiration.