For People Who Devour Books

Mar 2006

Alistair Horne

By Strength Alone?

Alistair Horne

A Twentieth-Century Gentleman

A British Achilles: The Story of George, 2nd Earl Jellicoe

By Lorna Almonds Windmill, with a foreword by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Pen and Sword 256pp £19.99

Brave men were living before Agamemnon
And since, exceeding valorous and sage, …
But then they shone not on the poet’s page,
And so have been forgotten.

So wrote Byron. Had it not been for Lorna Almonds Windmill’s excellent biography, George Jellicoe – one of Britain’s most remarkable surviving heroes of the Second World War – might well have remained forgotten. He now shines brightly from her pages

I have known George for upwards of thirty years, and was acquainted with his heroic career in the Aegean – after all, even in the Second World War, few men acquired a DSO and an MC, and became a brigadier by the age of twenty-six, and lived to tell the