The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican: My Father’s House, by Joseph O’Connor, reviewed

One of Joseph O’Connor’s strengths is his magpie-like approach to history: he plunders it for stories that he can rework as fiction. His new novel is based on the exploits of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a senior official at the Vatican, who, together with colleagues, was responsible for saving the lives of 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews after the Nazis occupied Rome in 1943.

It is by any standards an extraordinary tale. O Flaherty’s organisation called itself the Choir; the prisoners it sheltered were known as Books, and their hiding places, scattered across Rome, as Shelves. The priest was constantly at risk from the Gestapo, as were his helpers, who included Britain’s deliciously camp ambassador to the Vatican, the ambassador’s artful cockney butler, Major Derry of the Royal Artillery, and the ballad-singing wife of the Irish ambassador.