Nicholas Rankin
Big Bad Boat
Target Tirpitz: X-Craft, Agents and Dambusters – The Epic Quest to Destroy Hitler’s Mightiest Warship
By Patrick Bishop
HarperPress 390pp £20
A good reporter (‘God’s noblest work’, said Rudyard Kipling) can make a good narrative historian, someone more reader-friendly than your frigid academic. Foreign correspondents such as Peter Fleming, Alan Moorehead, William Shirer and Chester Wilmot all went on to write interesting, popular and valuable histories drawn from the Second World War they had known first-hand.
Patrick Bishop is from a later generation who did not experience the war but cannot resist its scale and drama. A war correspondent himself for over twenty years, he has a reliable bullshit-detector and writes clearly and modestly, serving the material rather than his own ego. He can do high
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society magazine that published serious journalism.
@PeterPeteryork looks at what Carter got right.
Peter York - Deluxe Editions
Peter York: Deluxe Editions - When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter
literaryreview.co.uk
Henry James returned to America in 1904 with three objectives: to see his brother William, to deliver a series of lectures on Balzac, and to gather material for a pair of books about modern America.
Peter Rose follows James out west.
Peter Rose - The Restless Analyst
Peter Rose: The Restless Analyst - Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age by Peter Brooks...
literaryreview.co.uk
Vladimir Putin served his apprenticeship in the KGB toward the end of the Cold War, a period during which Western societies were infiltrated by so-called 'illegals'.
Piers Brendon examines how the culture of Soviet spycraft shaped his thinking.
Piers Brendon - Tinker, Tailor, Sleeper, Troll
Piers Brendon: Tinker, Tailor, Sleeper, Troll - The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker
literaryreview.co.uk