In Crucible of Hell, David once again demonstrates his commanding power to hold the reader’s attention.
Book Reviews
REVIEW – The Glamour Boys: the secret story of the rebels who fought for Britain to defeat Hitler
Consisting of figures such as Rob Bernays, Jack Macnamara, Harold Nicolson, and Ronnie Cartland (brother of Barbara), the ‘Glamour Boys’ came of sexual and political age in the 1920s, when homosexuality was outlawed but enjoyed a thriving underground existence, often in unusual places.
REVIEW – Scholars of Mayhem: my father’s secret war in Nazi-occupied France
In early 1943, while at Harvard, Jean Claude was drafted into the Army. He was surprised to find life there more to his taste than he had anticipated, and that his fluent French marked him out for special service.
REVIEW – Lawrence of Arabia on War: the campaign in the desert, 1916-18
Rob Johnson’s achievement in this book is to take Colonel T E Lawrence seriously as a theoretician and practitioner of war, and to produce the most comprehensive assessment of his contribution ever published.
REVIEW – Missing: the need for closure after the Great War
In the post-war years, they were remembered on monuments and in cemeteries, ‘made present’ by absence, by anonymity rather than by naming. The bereaved had no bodies over which to grieve, only the landscape itself and a few souvenirs sent home from the front.
REVIEW – Churchill and Stalin: comrades-in-arms during the Second World War
As Churchill liked to say, to defeat the Nazis the Russians gave their blood, the Americans their money, and Britain held out for the crucial year from the summer of 1940.
REVIEW – Hunger: how food shaped the course of the First World War
Hunger is breezy in its approach, but the subject Blom discusses is a serious one. Indeed, the spectre of food – or lack of it – haunts the First World War.
REVIEW – Race of Aces: WWII’s elite airmen and the epic battle to become master of the sky
Thirty years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews have resulted in this fast-paced book seeing the light of day – a book so captivating that it reads almost like a pacy and well-researched novel.
REVIEW – The King’s Irish: the Royalist Anglo-Irish Foot of the English Civil War, 1643-1646
Just as there was no single Parliamentarian army during the English Civil War, there was no single Royalist Army either. But while there are a number of works about the various armies which formed the Parliamentarian forces during the Civil War, Royalist forces tend to be studied as a single entity.
REVIEW – Britain’s War: A New World, 1942 – 1947
Like the first volume, Britain’s War is not a military history, although the great battles of the war are described in some detail. It is not a political history either, though there is much analysis of political arguments. Nor is it an economic history, although it includes much economics.
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