If Leo McKinstry were a Hollywood biographer rather than a political journalist turned popular historian, Hurricane would be the equivalent of following up a biography of Marilyn Monroe with a life of Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis.

McKinstry’s last book, Spitfire, told the story of the glamorous star of the Battle of Britain, the fighter plane whose curving, womanly lines seduced the men who flew her. In contrast, the Hurricane, the subject of this book, was the plain Jane of the RAF, the solid, largely wooden workhorse that nonetheless, as McKinstry’s superb volume convincingly proves, won the Battle of Britain and saved this country’s freedom.

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