RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)A perceptive foreword by Oswyn Murray, for whose father Alexander worked in the Air Ministry during the war, describes the letters as \'an immense literary discovery\', but what they are above all is superbly entertaining ... on almost every page there is a gleaming little starburst of life ... She is immensely clever – set fair for a career in academe, until the war diverts her into the civil service – and her literary judgements are delicious ... Yet she is also unsophisticated, as open as a child. Her writing is a diary-like outpouring, a stream of consciousness in which she relives her days in the glorifying imagined gaze of her recipient; it is a mass of aperçus, jokes, observations and confessions, offered up in a style whose default position is that of a preternaturally brilliant schoolgirl, one who scatters Komic Kapitals with the abandon seen in the novels of Patrick Hamilton, but without the ironic intent ... But the point – the joy – of these letters is the highly particular story they tell. It is one that, for all its absorption in the details of daily life, seems frequently dissociated from the events that were directing the course of that life. The bombs fall on London, and do not go unmentioned; yet the real force of Alexander’s attention is on the personal ... We never forget, however, that these are love letters, in which the war’s most important role is to create the separation that brings them into existence.
