1 According to Pia de Jong in a charming piece for the Institute of Advanced Study, it was young Dyson himself who came up with the phrase: his father overheard him using it, was tickled, and sent it to Punch magazine. The article is at www.ias.edu/ideas/2013/de-jong-dyson.
2 National Archives AIR 40/1680.
3 As recounted in Freeman Dyson, ‘A Failure of Intelligence’, MIT Technology Review, 1 November 2006, a mesmerizing piece that can be read at www.technologyreview.com/s/406789/a-failure-of-intelligence.
4 Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for Their Realization (Chatto and Windus, 1937).
5 Dyson, ‘A Failure of Intelligence’.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (Harper & Row, 1979).
9 David Lodge, ‘Dam and Blast’ (1982), in his collection Write On (Secker & Warburg, 2012). Lodge also pointed out that, although his father was in the air force, he somehow avoided going up in a plane.
10 Tami Davis Biddle, ‘Bombing by the Square Yard: Sir Arthur Harris at War, 1942–1945’, International History Review, vol. 21, no. 3 (September 1999).
11 Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2006).
12 Ibid.
13 National Archives AIR 20/4831.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Lord Portal Papers, Christ Church, Oxford, folder 10, file 3A.
17 Ibid., file 3B.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., file 3C.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., file 3D.