Alan Judd
Spellmount's new edition of the two vol- umes of Rudyard Kipling's The Irish Guards in the Great War (L24.95) is partly uncommonly evocative regimental history, partly a moving memorial to Kipling's son, partly history as elegy and overwhelmingly a superb demonstration of the power of imaginative insight. A. D. Harvey's A Muse of Fire: Literature, Art and War (Hamble- don Press, £25) is half about the artistic product of that great seminal struggle and half about the artistic fall-out of other wars, garnered and commented on by an original and perceptive commentator.
The spy John Cairncross's posthumous memoir, The Enigma Spy: The Story of the Man Who Changed the Course of World War Two (Century, £16.99) was generally reviewed with some disdain, which shows how tolerant and nice most reviewers are. Had he lived, he might have been more forthrightly damned for the self-serving liar his book shows him to be.
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