Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national
service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed
many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack
Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel,
The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of
books over the following decades. These varied from historical
fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian
alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction
books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears
and Folly).
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold
War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a
world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the
personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of
the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of
soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour
and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the
key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler,
Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.
What Mr Deighton did for the Battle of Britain in Fighter he has
done for the land-war here ... A rattlingly good yarn.
*Guardian*
Deighton has a desire, unobtrusive but inflexible, to see the truth
... Blitzkrieg is full of insights, quietly expressed but as a rule
uncomfortably true.
*Financial Times*
Contains some gems of research and some arresting conclusions.
*New Statesman*
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