There have been many books recently featuring the brave little fighter plane that arguably saved Britain from Nazi subjugation – notably the memoirs of Geoffrey Wellum, one of the ever-dwindling ‘Few’ who actually flew the ‘Spit’; a biography of Reginald Mitchell, the miraculous machine’s designer, by his only son Gordon; and a history of the aircraft itself by The Guardian‘s design editor, Jonathan Glancey. Now Leo McKinstry, journalist turned historian, takes to the crowded skies of Spitfire studies with a massive book that deserves to be the last word on the subject.

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