If you have read Macintyre before, you’ll recognise a classic example of his style: the journalist’s eye for salacious detail combined with a historian’s rigor. The rest of Redwood lives up to the attention-grabbing opening scene; I devoured it in a single sitting ... They are sometimes derided as “dadlit”, the kind of nonfiction read by golf club bores and armchair colonels. But Redwood is as far above yet-another-book-about-the-second-world-war as a George Smiley novel is above Jack Reacher ... So, by all means give Redwood to your father for Christmas, but make sure you read it yourself first: it’s superb.
The British writer Ben Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers ... He has done it again ... The book’s last pages are its saddest.
