Historical Note

Yes . . . there were internment camps on the Isle of Man . . . no, there was no all-male camp as far south as Port Erin.

There is no synagogue resembling Heaven’s Gate or Elohim in the East End of London – indeed such is the paucity of synagogues these days that I based both buildings on the Eldridge Street Synagogue on New York’s Lower East Side. Just around the corner from Eldridge Street is a former synagogue, as tiny as any still standing in London, which was once known as ‘Gates of Heaven’.

Why this topic now? Well, I think we have lived these last few years in a world dominated by a man to whom the rest of the world, other than those from his own green acres in Texas, are just ‘kikes and niggers’. A man who cannot even pronounce the name ‘Iraq’. If you will substitute ‘towelhead’ or ‘ayrab’ for kike and nigger . . . it doesn’t alter the concept one jot.

A hit list drawn up by a British fascist of critics to be bumped off or dealt with? Of course, I made it up . . . until . . . towards the end of writing this book I stumbled across a reference to just this kind of list in the wartime diaries of Frances Partridge, a friend of whom was revealed to be on Sir Oswald Mosley’s ‘hit’ list after writing to the Daily Telegraph urging Mosley’s arrest.

The only point at which I think I have displaced a real figure with a fictional one is that, of course, Freud was rescued from Vienna by Professor Ernest Jones, subsequently Freud’s biographer; and himself the subject of a recent biography by Brenda Maddox. (Anyone who wants a straightforwardly factual account of Freud leaving Vienna should turn to Jones’s book – anyone who wants one more bizarre and dramatic than mine should turn to The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess.) Many of the minor characters in this novel were real – Cazalet, Ciano et al – many more are made up . . .

I’m deliberately vague about the date of publication of Moses and Monotheism (it was, loosely, the summer of 1939) and, whilst Freud was criticised widely for choosing that subject, at that time, to the best of my knowledge, the Board of Deputies never wrote as one body to any national newspaper.

Red Vienna is a slight misnomer and could more accurately be used to describe the Vienna of the early 1930s than the city Hitler seized.

Coming at the war for the third time I was keen not to return to the same sources. Apart from Frances Partridge (Hogarth Press, 1978), the most interesting books on the subject I discovered were the dispatches of Ernie Pyle (McBride, 1941), the diaries of Joan Wyndham (Heinemann, 1985), Home Front by E.S. Turner, who died while I was writing this book (Michael Joseph, 1961) and The Making of an Englishman by Fred Uhlman (Gollancz, 1960). Uhlman was a refugee who became a well-known North London painter – he died only about twenty years ago. On pp. 201–3 Uhlman offers a celebration of Englishness that I suspect only an immigrant could make . . . I used chunks of it in a speech by Viktor Rosen (pp. 297–9) as I cannot better it.