This AP photo appeared in today’s New York Times next to a story about the end of the BBC’s short­wave ser­vice. It caught my eye not because the man seated at the micro­phone is John Dos Passos—I would have never known it was him with­out the caption—but because of the poster that hangs over his shoul­der, which reads “be like dad, Keep Mum!” That poster was part of a WWII cam­paign in Britain against loose talk—you can just make out the tagline run­ning along the poster’s bottom edge, which reads, “Careless Talk Costs Lives.”

If you’ve read the first volume of Javier Marías’s excel­lent Your Face Tomor­row, you might remem­ber the Keep Mum poster; it’s one of many from the cam­paign that is repro­duced in the novel’s pages (this one shows up on page 320). If you haven’t, here’s some of what Peter Wheeler, one of the book’s char­ac­ters, has to say about it:
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