Rifleman by Victor Gregg is a book you ought to read

I live in New York and until this month I had never heard of Victor Gregg, the World War II veteran whose 2011 memoir, Rifleman, was hailed as possibly the most honest and outspoken ever written by an enlisted soldier and ‘an outstanding book that deserves to become a classic’.

Gregg is 93, which is an achievement in itself, but bright as a button. When I heard an interview he gave recently to the Today Programme replayed on National Public Radio, I was reminded of Stanley Holloway playing Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady. In fact, the only role Gregg ever played was that of a working man who, through no fault of his own, found himself in all the wrong places at all the wrong times.

His account of a life in conflict is a small masterpiece which only confirmed me in my view that we should probably stop obsessing over all the new books that come out until we’ve had a chance to read the good ones that have already appeared.