SOURCE: Kermode, Frank. “Reports from the Not Too Distant Canon.” London Review of Books 24, no. 10 (23 May 2002): 9.

In the following review, Kermode commends the ambition and sophistication of The Invasion Handbook, though notes that the volume's many obscure references may require supplementary reading.

This book [The Invasion Handbook] is a sequence or collection of poems and other things concerning events in Europe in the period between the Treaty of Versailles and, broadly speaking, the Battle of Britain. Some of the events and personalities, like the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno, are considerately annotated, but others, some of them much more obscure than these, are not. Consequently the reader's share, as Henry James called it, is quite half; or, to put it another way, unless you are a polymathic historian with some knowledge of literature you will need to do quite a lot of research to figure out what Paulin...