Items

• Enemy : a novel
  First published in the UK in 1981 as ‘The Deserters’, ‘Enemy’ was based initially on Robin Maugham’s play of the same name, which premiered in Guildford in 1969 before transferring to London. Maugham (1916-1981), the nephew of the novelist W. Somerset Maugham, drew on his experience in the Sahara during the Second World War for this tale of two soldiers, one British and one German, who stumble across each other in the desert. Maugham depicts a friendship that crosses boundaries of class, sexuality and nationality. Supported by Peter Burton, who edited Maugham’s short-story collection ‘The Boy from Beirut’, another of the books seized in ‘Operation Tiger’, ‘Enemy’ was the last book Maugham published before he died.
• The boy who picked the bullets up
  Charles Nelson (1942-2003) served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and claimed that some of this novel was autobiographical. The story follows medic Kurt Strom during a year he spent stationed in Vietnam. Strom’s experiences as a gay Marine are relayed via letters he sends home to his family and friends. One reviewer described the novel as containing “endless humour and devastating realism”, while the gay perspective was praised for presenting “decidedly different” insights on war. The novel’s title is taken from the poem of the same name by Arthur Rimbaud. Published by William Morrow, the book’s dust jacket shows a soldier’s trousered backside, with a blue bandana in the left pocket, alluding to ‘flagging’, a coded means of expressing sexual preferences.