HISTORY · NONFICTION
Matthew Parker
> Matthew Parker is a writer, editor and book reviewer who specialises in modern history. He grew up in East Sussex, where pieces of aircraft - and airmen - are still dug up from the fields. He went to Oxford University and now lives in London.
For most of the 1930s Britain's politicians and military leaders were haunted by nightmare visions of a massive 'knock-out blow' from the air against which there could be little defence save the threat of retaliation.
— from The Battle of Britain
Most acclaimed
Goldeneye
'Goldeneye', the story of Ian Fleming in Jamaica and the creation of British national icon, James Bond. From 1946 until the end of his life, Ian Fleming lived for two months of every year at Goldeneye - the house he built on a point of high land overlooking a small white sand beach on Jamaica's north coast. All the James Bond novels and stories were written here. Fleming adored the Jamaica he had discovered, at the time an imperial backwater that seemed unchanged from the glory days of the empire. Amid its stunning natural beauty, the austerity and decline of post-war Britain could be forgotten. For Fleming, Jamaica offered the perfect mixture of British old-fashioned conservatism and imperial values, alongside the dangerous and sensual - the same curious combination that made his novels so appealing, and successful. The spirit of the island - its exotic beauty, its unpredictability, its melancholy, its love of exaggeration and gothic melodrama - infuses his writing. Fleming threw himself into the island's hedonistic Jet Set party scene: Hollywood giants and the cream of British aristocracy, the theatre, literary society and the secret services spent their time here drinking and bed-hopping. But while the whites partied, Jamaican blacks were rising up to demand respect and self-government.
The Battle of Britain
British historian Holland (Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944–45, 2007, etc.) provides a thorough reconsideration of the Battle of Britain that is both staggeringly technical and dramatically engaging. According to the author, the battle began well before RAF Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding’s squadrons took on Hermann Göring’s mighty Luftwaffe over southeast England in July 1940. It is hard now to imagine how isolated and vulnerable Britain had grown at the increasing demonstrations of German aggression. With its lightning thrust into Belgium, Holland and France in the spring of 1940, the Nazi war machine seemed invincible. The French, despite having greater forces than the Germans, “had fallen for Nazi spin-doctoring.” Hemmed in with the British along the Channel coast, the Allied forces were saved from annihilation by a last-minute halt by the Germans, allowing them a miraculous evacuation from Dunkirk. As the French crumbled, the British were largely expected to sue for peace as well, if the prevailing defeatist voices were to be believed. The galvanizing role of the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, has been amply documented elsewhere, and Holland underscores the power of his rhetoric in steeling the nation to its defiant task, aided by the press and media. Thanks to delays caused by bad weather and Nazi dithering, the British were gaining strength and producing new aircraft at startling speed, so that by July they were ready for the Luftwaffe’s onslaught. Holland uses numerous interviews with British and German pilots for respective takes on strategy, and he takes a frank look at the strengths and weaknesses of each side. In the end, Hitler could not launch an invasion of Britain until the RAF could be destroyed—and the British did not let that happen. A painstakingly detailed history of the battle that exposed the myth of Nazi invincibility.