On the night of February 23, 1944, a series of 500lb German bombs crashed down on St James’s, shattering the windows of the Chapel Royal and ripping a hole in the western corner of St James’s Square. Had you been picking your way across the debris afterwards, you would have witnessed an extraordinary rescue operation: a human chain of British and American servicemen and bespectacled Bloomsbury types scrambling to load books into wheelbarrows.

Having survived nearly two wars unscathed (after an October 1917 bombing raid that ‘produced havoc in Piccadilly… our London Library stands whole,’ Virginia Woolf recorded), No 14’s luck had run out — the tall, narrow building’s north-west wing had suffered a hit that destroyed 16,000 books, with those remaining vulnerable to rain and the Fire Brigad

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