“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can really kill you. Words, metaphors, stories, can convince complete strangers that they have an obligation to disembowel you. Before anyone makes a smart bomb, they have to be persuaded, by smart words, that they should. Words create what Shakespeare called an “imaginary puissance” that can have lethal consequences. An imaginary garden, with real tanks. If you doubt that literature can ‘cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war’, consider four words enshrined in every library in the English-speaking world: ‘God fought for us’.”