The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Your book SAS Forged in Hell, tells the story of the part 1 SAS played in the Sicily and Italian campaigns of World War II. Could you start by telling us about the role they carried out under their commander Major Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne in those campaigns, which...
Robert Harris’ new novel Precipice begins in the long summer of 1914 when Europe sleepwalked into a disastrous war and the stalemate of the Western Front. Harris moves between romance, espionage and political intrigue, placing at the centre of these events the affair...
The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was a complex operation that required precise information about the movement and disposition of the US Pacific Fleet, based at Hawaii. This information was gathered on the ground by a spy named Takeo...
Dead Ground is a World War II thriller of the highest order and continues Graham Hurley’s “non-linear” The Spoils of War series, with each book covering a different aspect of World War II. The last book The Blood of Others was set around the Dieppe Raid in 1942. The...
Rising Tide, by Alan Bardos, is the first novel in the Daniel Nichols Spy Thriller Series - the author’s second historical fiction series. Bardos’ first book, The Assassins, was received with great acclaim - this trend was then continued throughout the rest of his...
In your new book Every Spy a Traitor you move away from a World War II/Post War setting and focus purely on a ‘Cold War’ with the Soviet Union in the 1930s. What was it that attracted you to the period? I liked the idea of a series that covered a longer time span,...
Queen High is CJ Carey’s sequel to her much acclaimed novel Widowland, both books are counter factual dystopian novels in a similar vein to 1984, Fatherland and Brave New World. They are set in a 1950s Britain where Lord Halifax became Prime Minister rather than...
Was Taranto the inspiration behind Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor? The Fleet Air Arm’s raid on the Italian naval base of Taranto in 1940 was the first-time carrier launched aircraft were used to attack enemy ships, in a heavily defended harbour. It has been...
Jimmy Burns’ biography of Walter Bell, charts the life of one of Britain’s most successful and influential intelligence officers. The fact that Bell is so little known outside of intelligence circles testifies to this success. Walter Bell appears to have been a...
The Rome Escape Line Lt Colonel Sam Derry’s memoir is an intriguing account of daring escapes and the day-to-day struggles of a clandestine organisation operating under the nose of an enemy who is actively hunting it down. Derry was taken prisoner during the North...
