Now, thanks to Lara Feigel’s moving and illuminating book, I can understand her a little better. Not that a young woman of working-class origins had much in common with Feigel’s heroes: five distinguished literary ladies and gents who lived in London during those five terrible years. For better or for worse, life was lived at an almost unimaginably intense pitch in those days – especially when it came to love and sex. It could indeed be said that many Londoners were having the time of their lives.

Feigel’s famous five are a mixed bunch. Literary London in the 1940s was a small world, so they had heard of each other, or knew one another, though it seems their paths seldom crossed. Graham Greene is still a superstar, of course. Henry Yorke (who wrote under the name of Henry Green), Elizabeth Bowen, and Rose Macaulay are also well known, though not so frequently read as in the past. The Austrian writer Hilde Spiel is the least familiar name, but her perspective offers a contrast to the others, and is also one of the most fascinating in the book.

It is not that these writers’ lives haven’t been examined before. What Feigel does that is so original and inspired is to take their letters, diaries, articles, and books, together with other sources such as war records, and weave a tale of what they did and what they felt during the war and its aftermath. This is at once deeply intimate and universal, and it is all about blazing, amorous emotions, war as aphrodisiac.

Malcolm Muggeridge described the Blitz as ‘a kind of protracted debauch’. Graham Greene worked as an air-raid warden and was certain the war would kill him, which seemed to suit his suicidal temperament quite nicely. He captured the weirdly erotic atmosphere: ‘The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine (“Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?”), the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm.’

As you might expect, there are dramatic scenes of carnage. Macaulay, who worked as an ambulance driver, watched a woman emerge from the ruins of a bombed street: ‘Oh, my back, my legs, my head. Oh, dear God, my children.’ To get her into the ambulance, Macaulay assured her the children would be all right. They turned out to be dead, their bodies crushed in the rubble.

This untitled London scene photographed by George Rodger on 30 April 1945 is taken from a remarkable and searing new catalogue titled War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, which accompanies a touring exhibition in the United States (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston [Inbooks], $99.95 hb, 606 pp, 9780300177381).

Similar scenes are noted by Greene and Yorke, who worked as a firefighter and rather enjoyed girls admiring him as a hero. ‘These times are an absolute gift to the writer,’ he wrote. ‘Everything is breaking up. A seed can lodge or sprout in any crack or fissure.’ His novel Caught (1943), based on his experiences with the fire service, was perhaps the most direct fictional response to the Blitz, and was so critical of the firemen that when it was translated into German he feared it would be used as Nazi propaganda.

Spiel described running into her little daughter Christine’s room as the bombs fell:

The wall at the side of the crib collapsed, falling, thank God, in the other direction. My leg was injured. Peter’s [her husband, Peter de Mendelssohn] lip was split; the blood pouring, he ran to the nearest doctor, who stitched the wound without anaesthetic. All the residents of our building sat around together in the entrance hall for a while, until the all clear surrounded. Conscious of having escaped danger by a hair’s breadth, we found relief in hectic gaiety.

These were scenes experienced night after relentless night. Oddly enough, they did evoke ‘hectic gaiety’ and deeper emotions, due to the effect of experiencing life in a perpetually suspended present. Even the dark devastated streets and the play of fire and searchlight had their own hallucinogenic beauty.

For Elizabeth Bowen most of all, Feigel concludes, the war was a charmed pocket of unrepeatable happiness. Content enough in her platonic marriage, she suddenly fell in love with a Canadian diplomat, Charles Ritchie – a love that lasted as a poignant ideal all her life, even when Charles later married and went to live in another country.

Greene and Yorke packed their wives and children off to the countryside and safety, and threw themselves briskly into love affairs, Greene with the feisty Dorothy Glover, his companion during the air raids, and Yorke with a succession of admiring young things, often several at once. Marriage or children, it seems, were never an impediment to love elsewhere for any of these writers.

Macaulay had a tougher time: she was older, tired, and already mourning the imminent death of the married Irish novelist Gerald O’Donovan, her secret lover for twenty years. Spiel had perhaps the most frustrating time: stuck in the suburb of Wimbledon, the ‘green grave’, with her children, her loving but erratic husband, and her timorous parents, in exile from her beloved Vienna, all too conscious that the bombers that threatened their lives every night might be piloted by her fellow countrymen.

Halfway through this long book, the war ends. What followed for the writers was often a disappointing anti-climax – but fortunately not for the reader of this book. The emotional patterns created by living in a suspended present would not go away simply because there was now a rather grey future on the horizon. If anything the amorous entanglements intensified, especially for Greene.

For Spiel, the turbulence of postwar Europe, where she travelled as a foreign correspondent, was an intellectual and social liberation. She was no longer in the hated role of housewife, and could allow herself one or two little flings of her own. There is a touching portrait of an ageing and eccentric Rose Macaulay, still very busy writing, finding solace by exploring ruins and going for bracing swims.

This is a book that evokes strong and perhaps prejudicial emotions in the reader, though Feigel is always scrupulous about not passing judgement on her writers. I confess I felt more for the women. Hilde Spiel was born for feminism; though it arrived too late for her (I was relieved to discover she blossomed after the war). I became cross with Yorke’s philandering and essential remoteness, and I swore aloud at Greene when I read how he ditched his wife Vivien in the most callous fashion after his postwar affair with Catherine Walston (his inspiration for The End of the Affair [1951]) was revealed. My reaction is a compliment to Feigel’s power to engage the reader through her intricate weaving of tellingly selected detail. I should add that she then re-engaged my sympathies with the men as she analysed their anguish.

It is not so much that Feigel sheds new light on the writers’ works – more a case that the writers’ works, in conjunction with other sources, shed new light on their lives. We should always beware of treating fiction as autobiography, but here the links between the novels and reality are plausible and revealing.

In these sure hands, The Love-charm of Bombs becomes two books in one: a revelatory document of disturbing times seen through the microcosm of five writers’ experiences; and a collective emotional biography. ‘War is a prolonged passionate act, and we were involved in it,’ wrote Elizabeth Bowen. Thanks to Lara Feigel, we readers are also involved in it.