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 order from our bookshop
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.
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'"Dutch Light" roots its subject in his local environment, explaining, for example, how an abundance of sand for making glass led naturally to a thriving business in optical instruments in Holland.'
Patricia Fara on the life & work of Christiaan Huygens.
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