Alan Judd

Old-Fashioned Hero

Man of War: The Secret Life of Captain Alan Hillgarth, Officer, Adventurer, Agent

By

Century 433pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Biographies of the little-known generally attract no more attention than their subjects did in their lifetimes – unless, as with Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Dickens’s mistress Nelly Ternan, they are associated with more famous figures. I knew that Alan Hillgarth was an influential Second World War naval attaché at the British embassy in Madrid, but that was all. He bore a torch in that great conflagration, like many thousands of others, but you need to be painted in big, bold colours to show up in the crowded pages of history.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    • 'Ho was no Soviet or Chinese puppet. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Had the Americans just realised this.… ,
    Follow Us