Bamboozling the opposition

This book, like so much of the modern western population, is obese. It weighs three pounds one and a half ounces (1.4 kg) and runs to 1,148 pages. I read it in a series of closely connected long sessions, hoping thereby to retain the thread, but unfortunately there is not much of a thread to follow. Instead, a concentrated mass of information, much of it of gripping interest, is presented in a bewildering series of disjointed chronological, geographical and systematical sequences.

Sir Michael Howard, himself an expert aficionado in this subject, states in his encomium printed on the dust jacket that the book is ‘definitive’, that the author has ‘trawled through all the documentation’ and that he has interviewed ‘all the survivors’. ‘Definitive’ — hardly; Holt himself observes there is still much material to be discovered. ‘All the documentation’ — well, a very great deal of it. ‘All the survivors’ — quite possibly. Basically, how- ever, Howard is right in the sense that another work on this subject, of this authority and on this scale is unlikely ever to be undertaken.

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Rod Liddle

British Steel and the death of dim-witted globalisation

Holt takes us down the highways and the byways of strategic and tactical deception in the second world war, dealing even-handedly, too even-handedly perhaps, with the important and the unimportant, the effective and the fatuous, the wily and the careless. By the end, I felt I had had rather too much of Peter Fleming and his distributions of corpses and knapsacks etc. for the edification of the Japanese, who usually seem not to have bothered to pick them up. It may be, too, that the detailed and lengthy descriptions of the jolly times had by the deception teams, so many of whom seem to have been old Etonian bachelors, as they migrated between London (the Hungaria restaurant), Cairo (Shepheards), New York, Istanbul, Lisbon and occasionally South America, are a little overdone.