In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A
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But on the EMI business, I just wanted to say that I got a real shock the morning I clicked on my link to the Naxos Music Library and found myself reading a notice that Naxos would henceforth be distributing the EMI catalogue: All of it, from Beatrice Harrison to Leif Ove Andnes. They estimate it will take them three months to add the whole lot to the Library. The Boult recordings added thus far have been enough to keep me occupied for a while, and some I never thought to hear, as also recordings of others. And, I must add, they are now also the distibutor for Virgin. There's significance in here somewhere, though I've not yet fathomed it Perhaps I'm too busy avidly listening.