Author:Gavin Lyall
From the brilliant summer nonchalance of 1940 to the grim, anonymous exhaustion of the bomber crews delivering the infernos of Hamburg and Dresden. All the great dramas of the air war are here, described by the men in the British and Commonwealth Air Forces who did the fighting. We accompany them in the desperate days of the fall of France; during the Battle of Britain; throughout the agony of Bomber Command; over the high seas, Malta, the desert battles and in the struggle with Japan.
This is the second volume in the unique Freedom's Battle trilogy, which provides intensely vivid accounts of war at sea, in the air and on land. Far better than any single narrative, the extracts build up a complete picture of the War as it was experienced by the men and women who actually took part in it.
Comprehensive, skilfully edited and eminently readable.
—— Sunday TimesA wonderful selection.
—— Yorkshire PostIt presents a faithful and graphic series of pictures linked by the briefest and clearest summaries... Well balanced and comprehensive.
—— Times Literary SupplementParker has written the Panama story for a new generation. He quotes extensively from letters and diaries of ordinary workers writing home to their families. And it is their heartfelt views on the conditions in which they lived and worked that really bring this book to life
—— The EconomistParker's great forte in Panama Fever is to bring this complex story to life through a succession of vivid characters
—— Sunday TelegraphParker guides readers through the complicated story with a sure sense of both the larger narrative and the telling detail
—— Sunday TimesExcellent... the story is an epic one, and Parker has brilliantly done justice to every aspect of a complex episode
—— Frank McLynn , IndependentThe essence of Parker's rather remarkable achievement in this altogether entertaining history is to show just how much more than an engineering triumph the construction of the canal really was... This is exemplary history, vigorously told with a respect for complexity that enriches rather than obscures the pleasure of a great story
—— LA TimesThe extraordinary story of western man's compulsion to wrestle with nature in the central American swamps and rainforests
—— The GuardianMatthew Parker intertwines the various strands of the story - personal and national, political and financial, geographical and technological - with finesse ... Best of all, his prose somehow manages to infect the reader with the Panama fever itself. It is no mean achievement
—— The SpectatorToday other armies of impoverished workmen build Dubai, Shanghai or the Three Gorges Dam with barely a murmur of the real price paid by them and by nature. It is a shame. We need writers capable of depicting these epic projects with the same skill Parker brings to portraying the 19th century's great engineering dream
—— The GuardianA compelling novel of passions and secrets, politics and lies, love and betrayal, savagery and survival
—— SAGASweeping historical epic about a daring young woman forced to make a hard choice in Stalinist Russia
—— OBSERVER TOP FIVE SUMMER READS OF 2008Excellent... the historical detail is strong. The characterisation is superb, with Sashenka being especially well drawn. With her unwanted beauty and charisma, her gentle nobility that transcends class or wealth and her earnest ideals which eventually cost her so much. Sashenka commands out total sympathy, and when she is forced apart from her children, the sadness is profound and hard to dispel. A powerful novel... with a heroine who lingers in the mind when the story is finished
—— SPECTATORSashenka is grand in scale, rich in historical research, and yet never loses the flow of an addictive, racy, well-wrought plot. It combines a moving, satisfyingly just-neat-enough finale with a warning - that history has an awful habit of repeating itself
—— THE SCOTSMANAn epic novel... The suspense lasts until the final pages. There is no let-up. At the end of the book, you really feel that even though Sashenka is a fictional character, she has become one of the thousands of real people who haunt the Moscow archives that Montefiore knows so well
—— SUNDAY EXPRESS