From Luke Bishop : the two WWII books!?!
Morning Myles,
I know you are a busy man.
If you get a second could you post/ send the two WWII books you have read recently. Your endorsements are the best reviews.
Keep up the writing … … you never know you could have a lot of positive reader comments on Wednesday, should we get the result against Monaco I think we are more than capable of.
There is no way Giroud could miss as many sitters as that again … … is there?
Myles says:
Olivia Manning would never end a sentence with a preposition, Luke, even if she was tapping out a quick email.
The Balkan Trilogy was filmed as Fortunes Of War and the follow-up masterpiece was The Levant Trilogy.
Reading about Harriet Pringle walking through the streets of wartime Cairo, I kept seeing Emma Thompson’s face. I started hating her husband Guy Pringle about page 80 and it got worse as I read on and on to 569, the final page.
She’s the only woman writer I adore.
Olivia shows us people in challenging situations, to put it mildly. Rommel’s Afrika Corps was 50 miles from Cairo for months.
She shows us the war from inside the hearts and minds of men and women and she’s always succinct, as here on p.512:
It was Dobson’s belief that the British Empire began to decay when the speed-up of communications gave the Colonial Office dominion over the colonial governors.
The original novels were published in 1977 and 1988 and 1982.
Anthony Burgess, a formidable critic, called them ,”The finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer.”
The second book, Double Cross, is an amazing true story about double agents written by Ben Macintyre in the style of a thriller.
The characters who are willing to become double agents are very unusual people and I kept forgetting that these characters, and the things they did, were all true. The agents were “run” by intelligence staff from an office in Mayfair in a real street I’ve never walked down.
Monaco?
Arsenal are playing fluently enough to win 1-0 or 2-1 and Giroud IS a likely scorer.
But it’s football and anything can happen.