The 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes forest “had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west,” concludes Antony Beevor in this book. And “terrifying brutality” is an accurate description indeed of…
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Henry Hemming is a great story-teller — and this is a great story. In June 1940, during the ‘darkest hour’ in modern British history, when a German invasion of England seemed only weeks away, William…
Go into a bookstore these days and often the only book you’ll find by Sinclair Lewis is It Can’t Happen Here, a satirical look at the rise of a fascist regime in America in the…
The revelation in the late 1990s that the British had seriously considered assassinating Hitler was a journalistic bombshell. Very quickly, the National Archives (then the Public Records Office) published the entire Operation Foxley dossier with…
Hemingway wrote this short collection of vignettes during the very last years of his life. And because of that, they are the mature reflections of a great writer looking back at the beginning of his…
I first read this book around 50 years ago and have read it several times since. When it was reissued in the late 1960s, the publisher touted it as being especially relevant to the political…
This short book consists mainly of a long and very secret memorandum, illustrated with maps and photographs, prepared by the British in 1944. The document lays out a series of options for killing the German…
British crime writer Mark Billingham has written 16 novels in the DI Tom Thorne series, most of them set in North London in the present day, and all of them in sequential order — until…
I first heard of the Lockhart Plot, as many others will have done, in the British television series from the 1980s, Reilly: Ace of Spies. That was a largely fictionalised version of the story, but…
There is a sub-genre of crime fiction that is set in war-time. And most often the war is the Second World War. Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Robert Harris’ Fatherland and Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series are…