McKendrick grew up, as did everybody in Britain over the age of thirty, with an ambiguous victory. We won the war and lost the peace, and he will have watched with the same bemusement as Britain declined quietly from its imperial and industrial zeniths to become this place where we live now, rather guiltily regretting something that we've learnt, since history dispensed with it on our behalf, was shameful; an empire that retreated, leaving behind it Ulsters everywhere.

Arriving at the years of majority, most British men find themselves with a thoroughly inappropriate vocabulary. Achtung! Englander! Teufel! Ein Schpitfeur! Gott in Himmel! More than the vocabulary, there's a body of myths; bravery's, acts of magnificent defiance and glorious self-sacrifice, all drawn from the pages of the Hotspur, the War Picture Library and Commando Comics.

The Germans will have told such stories too, the Americans and the Japanese; stories for children, the essential moral of which modulates gently and imperceptibly as the age of the audience grows until, for adults, it becomes what Wilfred Owen called the old lie: dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. It is sweet and fitting to die for your country. This is a vocabulary, a library, which McKendrick remains willing to use.

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