In memory of that hour and in honor of the dead, a two-minute silence is still observed across the United Kingdom at 11 A.M., on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, every year. (I was once at a British airport, trudging through security, when the two-minute silence struck; the expression on the faces of the travellers around me, as the conveyor belts shuddered to a halt, was one of international bafflement.) Only once, though, in passing, does McLoughlin refer to the two-minute silence, as if discomforted by its state-sponsored formality. “Here are embarrassing silences, controlling silences, silences that provoke outrage and sympathy, silences that shift and slip away,” McLoughlin writes. The temptation to sniff the pages for a vanilla silence or a strawberry silence is almost overwhelming.