Time out of Joint

&ldquo;The war continues to have a strange, somnambulistic quality,&rdquo; wrote Mollie Panter-Downes about London in late 1939. That was still a &ldquo;phoney war,&rdquo; and many still refused to believe that the old peacetime was over and the world was spiralling fast into the hottest war it had ever seen. But war never changes. It is exactly the same now. We also refused to believe that the…