A myth-busting, page-turning history of the Battle of Britain
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.
Revolutionised thinking about the Battle of Britain in a way that
has not been seriously challenged since.
*The Times*
Must surely rank as the most honest attempt yet to tell how the
Battle of Britain really was.
*Observer*
The research was so meticulous that his conclusions, chiefly that
the Few were very brave but their leaders were daft, could not
easily be set aside. Indeed, they are now part of the
orthodoxy.
*The Independent*
The best, most dispassionate story of the battle I have read and I
say that even though the book destroyed many of my illusions and,
indeed, attacks the validity of some of what I wrote as an
eyewitness.
*New York Times Book Review*
[We learn] that British anti-aircraft fire was ineffective, that
some R.A.F. ground personnel fled under fire, that the Admiralty
provoked costly skirmishes ...The book resounds with exploded
myths.
*Washington Post*
Deighton has shown himself to be the most protean of British
best-sellers.
*London Review of Books*
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