Simon Heffer
Where’s Monty?
An Army at Dawn: The War In North Africa, 1942-1943
By Rick Atkinson
Little, Brown 681pp £20 order from our bookshop
EVER SINCE THE end of the Second World War it has been a fivourite occupation of the British to find misrepresentations by the Americans of their respective involvements in the conflict. Usually, this has taken the form of complaints from British audiences about inaccuracies in Hollywood h.It b egan in 1945 with the preposterous Err01 Flynn vehcle Objective Burma, which suggested that the campaign against the Japanese in that country was fought without the help of a single British Tommy. The diplomatic incident this caused was so emlosive that the f&n was not released in Britain for another seven years, and then only with what Halliwell's Film Guide calls 'an apologetic prologue'.
Rick Atkinson makes much of the tensions between the British and American 'cousins' during the war. They seem to have been so serious that it is hardly surprising a section of Hollywood should have wanted the British written out of the script immediately aftenvards. In his account of the war
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
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger