Brian Bollen's Blog

Kevin Keegan: My Life in Football - a cracking read

 

Title:  Kevin Keegan My Life In Football

Author: Kevin Keegan, with Daniel Taylor

Publisher: Macmillan

Pps: 342 including index and acknowledgements

Price: £20

Publication date: October 4 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5098-7720-1

Say what you like about Kevin Keegan – and as a long-suffering Scottish football fan I have uttered many a scabrous word on the subject – he is always hugely entertaining. Even when he doesn’t mean to be.

I don’t know the man, I’ve never met him, but he has been in or around football for around three-quarters of my life and I have found it impossible not to form an opinion about him. That is wholly down to his ubiquity on our television screens as a high-level player and Superstars contestant in the 1970s and early 1980s, and then as a manager committed to some of the most beautiful - but ultimately well nigh fruitless - attacking football ever seen.

The Spy and the Traitor

 

Title: The Spy and the Traitor

Author: Ben McIntyre

Publisher: Viking

Pps: 366 including notes and index

Price: £25

Publication date: September 20 2018

ISBN: 978-0-241-18665-7

“The best true spy story I have ever read.”

Who could ask for more than a commendation like that from John Le Carré, the undisputed master of spy fiction since the early 1960s?

I almost ripped this book out of the arms of the postman when he arrived this morning, his trademark loud knock announcing that he had a parcel that would not fit through the letterbox.

I have read several of Ben McIntyre’s books, including Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, Doublecross and SAS Rogue Heroes, and on doing a quick Google search for confirmation of those titles am delighted to see that there are several others I haven’t even seen yet, including one about James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

The raw material of this latest title takes us into less familiar territory, telling the story of a senior KGB officer who, as the blurb tells us, for more than a decade “had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine”.

Standing on the pavement of a busy street in Moscow, the Safeway plastic carrier bag he was holding “was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia” (a rather more nuanced move than the way suggested by Peter Cook in the best of the Derek and Clive live recordings).

Ben McIntyre is a very good writer. He writes simply and communicates quickly and effectively. Even his introduction is breathtaking: by the bottom of its second page any lingering doubt that I might have had about the subject matter.

He introduces Colonel Oleg Antonyevich Gordievsky, newly promoted to be head of the KGB station in London (a plum posting he reminds us) and returning to a flat in Moscow that has just had KGB eyes and ears installed throughout and radioactive dust sprinkled on the clothes and shoes in the wardrobe (I instinctively prefer that to the ‘closet’ but that is as much of a quibble as I will utter here).

Blockchain bollocks

I have just read the first few papers of a so-called white paper (hang on, isn't white one of the favourite colours for Andrex?) on yet another exciting, thrilling, pioneering, market-leading, world-changing development in blockchain.

I can honestly say I have never read such concentrated and utter bollocks anywhere in my entire life. Then again, a foreign idiot who rang me cold on the phone the other day started shouting at me and calling me a liar because I dismissed supposed cryptocurrencies in the manner of someone who has spent an entire professional life in and around international institutional finance.

Given the choice between acquiring a cryptocurrency and cash substitute vouchers from John Lewis & Partners, I'd opt for the vouchers from John Lewis & Partners every time...

Hitler's British Traitors

Title: Hitler’s British Traitors

Author: Tim Tate

Publisher: Icon Books

Pps: 454 including notes and index

Price: £25

Publication date: September 6 2018

ISBN: 978-1-78578-405-7

 

I would have thought that it was well nigh impossible to publish a book containing reams of factual material about events before and during World War II (WWII) that most people will never have read before.

But Tim Tate has done just that with this book, subtitled The Secret History of Spies, Saboteurs and Fifth Columnists, ‘drawing on hundreds of declassified official files – many of them previously unpublished’ as the blurb inside the front cover states.

As the blurb continues, this book ‘uncovers the largely unknown history of more than 70 British traitors who were convicted, mostly in secret trials, of working to help Nazi Germany win the war, and several hundred British fascists who were interned without trial on evidence that they were working on behalf of the enemy’.

Escaping Hitler: Heroic True Stories of Great Escapes in Nazi Europe

 

Title: Escaping Hitler: Heroic True Stories of Great Escapes in Nazi Europe

Author: Monty Halls

Publisher: Pan

Pp: 307 including bibliography and acknowledgements

Price: £8.99 (paperback)

I've said here before more than once that I have been an avid fan of World War II escape literature since seeing The Great Escape when I was 10 or 11.

This book looks like a cracking addition to the canon. I dipped into it for a quick taste this morning and came across the following advice from MI9, the intelligence organisation established to help would-be and actual escapers.

Do not march in a military fashion, but adopt a tired slouch.

Try and 'collect' a bicycle.

Sling your haversack: French peasants commonly carry one in this way, but never a pack on their backs.

Village priests are likely to be helpful.

Every large animal in Europe is edible.

Some of this advice is obvious. Some is not. The combination of well informed tips and practical help must have been enormously helpful to the people at the sharp end of escaping. Here's a statistic: Germans were of course well aware of the escape ethos, notes the author. They were also aware of the existence of escape aids, in particular maps, 'but evidently not to the extent that they could intercept them as a matter of course. By 1944 they had uncovered nine escape maps, out of a total of 200 originals and 750,000 copies'. 

I thought I might be not so keen on the accounts of following in the footsteps of escapers, but Halls very adroitly mixes the mundanity of the present with the tension of the underlying escapes, as with the escape of Len Harley from Campo 78 in Italy on September 8 1943, bursting out of the camp in the belief that the war was over as a result of the Italian armistice. Much very good writing follows as Len and his fellow escapees spend months making their way through the landscape.

The author is an ex-Royal Marine, marine biologist, documentary broadcaster, expedition leader and writer, his biography at the front of the book explains. What, this writer wonders, does he do in his spare time? 

Seriously, I vaguely remember the Great Escapes series on BBC2. Thanks to the most cursory sampling of this book I'll be hunting it down on the iPlayer and/or YouTube. Any self-respecting fan of the genre will likely do the same.

I'm now going to break my own rule on premature use of the C-word, but as Waitrose is already selling magazines with special seasonal covers, I almost feel justified. If you know someone who likes reading escape literature, you have just found an excellent Christmas present.

 

 

John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century

Title: John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century

Publisher: Maclehose Press

Author: James Buchan

Pp: 534 including index, acknowledgements and author biography

Price: £30

Publication date: September 6 2018

I have read tantalising brief accounts of John Law in a series of books outlining financial history. He could be charitably described as an adventurer (as here), or a buccaneer, even a pioneer in his field for having, according to this book, invented fiat money in France in the 18th century.

In modern parlance amongst the humble Scots who are his counterparts in the 21st, he would be labelled a chancer of the first order, a fly man of the top rank. Even in this sympathetic portrayal the author concedes from the start that over the centuries, Law has been portrayed as a crook, a rake and a madman, but today, observes Buchan, many of his ideas are now the plainest orthodoxy.