You will already have heard of the quartet of heroes, three American and one British, who, traveling on a train from Amsterdam to Paris, tackled and disarmed an Islamicist terrorist wielding an AK-47 and other weapons, thus saving many lives besides their own. The three Americans, all from California, were childhood friends traveling together. Two of the three, Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlotos, were military men, one Air Force, the other National Guard, traveling in mufti, although the first reports identified them as Marines; the third, Anthony Sadler, was a college student. All three, together with the Briton, Chris Norman, received the French Légion d’honneur from François Hollande personally. “Your heroism must be an example for many and a source of inspiration,” said the French president. “Faced with the evil of terrorism, there is a good, that of humanity. You are the incarnation of that.”

The story, you might have supposed, wrote itself. But that was just the problem to some in the media, jealous of their prerogative to write such things up and make them conform to a larger narrative of their own. You could see this jealousy at work in a curious little piece by Geoff Dyer in The Guardian a week after the events of the chemin de fer. It was headed: “Gung-ho Americans, steady Brits, and a lack of French resistance—but was the story of the terror train really so clear?” The headline was a bit of a tease, since Mr. Dyer