Fire From the Sky

This book will vex and outrage many readers (as it did when it was first published in Britain earlier this year), for many wrong reasons and for a few right ones. Its author is one of those U.K. academics who has achieved something like celebrity: he writes regularly for the fancy British newspapers and magazines, and his books are best sellers.

Most of the current crop of “teledons” are historians, but Grayling is a philosopher, and he believes that his field “should take an active, useful role in society,” which makes him something of a busybody, as he applies philosophical and ethical precepts to the muck of the Real World. He does so here by examining perhaps the most fraught and controversial episode in his country’s modern history: the Allies’ so-called area-bombing campaign—the indiscriminate assaults on enemy cities—during the Second World War. Grayling concludes that these efforts were “moral crimes,” ...