Seriously? I love that movie – 84 Charing Cross Road – but haven’t read the book on which it’s based. Anyone around here who has? David Foster, I’m betting you have!

- Madhu

The way this potentially helped the Tennyson-loving agent was by reducing the odds that he would be required to retransmit a message. It didn’t always work–even with a greaty expanded group of well-trained FANYs, not all “indecipherables” could be broken.

I miss the point of this episode. So, what exactly did he do for that guy? What did he taught the “girls”? And why it took them “only two days” to decipher some message? How long did it take them before his instruction?
It all sounds a bit strange…like a story without a punchline.

I know programmers and generally people who use math in their professions love books and films about WWII coding (I vaguely remember a movie about Brits cracking some code or other, with incomprehensible accents and foggy plot). The subject bores me.

Poetry, on the other hand, is a different matter.
There is nothing surprising in the age of the poet – isn’t poetry by definition – the freshness of outlook, the grasping of underlying connections and associations of life expressed in concentrated poetic form – isn’t it all an extension of young and clear mind curious at the doorstep of incomprehensible world?
All original poetry was written by young people. How old was Byron when he died? At what age Pushkin or Rimbaud written their best?

I remember your very interesting post about Noor; it reminded of my own http://creakypavillion.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/%D0%BD%D1%83%D1%83%D1%80-%D1%83%D0%BD-%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%B0-%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%8F%D1%82-%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%BD/“>inquiries after reading it.

I am on volume III of Pogue’s biography of Marshall. Thank you again.

- Madhu

Another relevant link: Jeannie Rousseau, who was not an SOE agent but rather an indigenous French Resistance member.

I did not think the “Carve Her Name with Pride” movie was much good. Virginia McKenna did not make a convincing “dark-haired slip of mischief.”

I have the bio of Noor Inayat Khan but have not read it yet.

I look forward eagerly to your post about Mr. Cammaerts.

I recently watched Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. She was also brave, like the SOE women, and like them died at the hands of the Third Reich. But unlike them she was in no position to actually have an impact, since the Nazis were already in power and she was doomed the moment she crossed them. The trick is to prevent it from ever getting to that point.