Roderick Bailey
The Spy Who Loved Men
The Shooting Star: Denis Rake MC, A Clandestine Hero of the Second World War
By Geoffrey Elliott
Methuen 251pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
A few years ago, in the shelves of McNaughton’s bookshop in Edinburgh, I turned up a copy of They Fought Alone, a 1958 account of British agents’ exploits with the French Resistance. The author, Maurice Buckmaster, had been head of the French Section of Britain’s Special Operations Executive. Scribbled inside the cover, in red ink long faded to pink, is a page-length inscription by Denis Rake, one of the featured agents. ‘A mon cher ami Arthur’, Rake’s note begins. ‘You will find lots of things not as I told you.’
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