Count Folke Bernadotte is largely forgotten today, but his murder in Jerusalem in 1948 made headlines around the world. The first UN peace mediator in the Middle East, he was targeted by members of the…
This is history on a grand scale. James Holland has limited himself to the war in the west, covering the period up to the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941. So in terms…
I enjoyed James Carol’s Jefferson Winter novels. It was a guilty pleasure, I admit that. My life is not richer for having read them. So I had high hopes that I’d enjoy this techno-thriller, and…
One thing I loved about this book is that it tells a much bigger story than one might imagine. At the heart of Lewis’ tale is the heroic raid by British paratroopers in early 1942…
When I learned that John le Carré had a new book coming out, I ordered it in advance and began reading it the day it arrived. I did so because his last book, A Legacy…
What a great idea for a book: a review of the all the German plans, some completely bonkers, some plausible, to strike back at the United States during the Second World War. One of the…
Their Little Secret, the latest in the Tom Thorne series of crime novels, offers further proof of why author Mark Billingham is probably the best crime writer in Britain today — and one of our…
I read this book in the wrong order as it precedes Akunin’s Black City, which I recently completed. And it does set the stage (sorry – couldn’t resist) for the latter book, with Fandorin now…
Boris Akunin is the pseudonym for Grigory Chkhartishvili, one of the most successful crime writers ever to emerge from Russia. His series of books featuring Erast Fandorin span several decades of the late 19th and…
This book has now gone through several editions, and was recently re-issued with a slightly different title. It is a very short history of the Battle of Britain of 1940-41 and in just a few…