M.R.D. Foot
The first volume of Martin Gilbert's The Churchill War Papers (Heinemann), covering his spell at the Admiralty from September 1939 to May 1940, is a tremen- dous mine of information — but costs a prohibitive £80. H. R. Kedward's In Search of the Maquis (Clarendon Press, £35) is more manageably priced, and historically even more precious: because Kedward overturns two generations' worth of weak books about resistance and military history by explaining who it was who took to the maquis in France in 1942-4, and how much weight they managed to exert in the fight- ing to liberate France from Nazi occupa- tion in the summer of 1944. Sir Peter Wilkinson and Joan Bright Astley, in their equally refreshing Gubbins and SOE (Leo Anyone here interested in resurrecting the two-martini business lunch?' Cooper, £17.95), give a lively account of the half-Scottish regular soldier whose originality and enterprise supplied the maquis, and many thousands of other resisters in Europe and Asia, with the arms without which they could have done noth- ing.
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