The SAS explode from the shadows in six days that shook Britain
Ben Macintyre has a knack of distilling impeccably sourced information about clandestine operations into clear, exciting narrative prose. His latest book, about the April 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London, starts as it means to go on – with a snapshot of seven Range Rovers, two Ford Transit vans and two furniture lorries pulling out of Bradbury Lines, the then headquarters of the Special Air Service (SAS) in Hereford. Lying low inside were 45 soldiers and ‘enough weaponry to fight a medium-sized war’. Each man carried a submachine gun, mostly the ‘reliably lethal’ Heckler & Koch MP5, which fires 13 rounds a second, with four 30-round magazines of 9x19mm parabellum
