> couldn’t work out if Clarke was mad or brilliant or both. ‘He had a disquieting habit, during lectures, of exhibiting to us one of his pets [he means an explosive device] with a large charge attached, placing it on the desk in front of him, cocking it, and announcing: “This will go off in five minutes.”’ He would then proceed with his lecture, unconcerned by the ticking bomb, while his students nervously counted the minutes. ‘During the last half of the last minute the sound of his voice was almost drowned by the shuffling and scraping of chairs, especially from the front rows. When only five seconds remained, and every head in the class was down, he would suddenly remember, pick up the infernal machine, look at it for a moment, thoughtfully, and toss it nonchalantly through the window to explode on the lawn with barely a second to spare.’

> ‘He had no guards on the gates to his magnificent estate. One just drove in and then found the vehicle being battered by rounds fired from spigot mortars set off by trip wires.’ Happily for the occupants of the cars in question, these rounds were blanks. ‘Nobby [Clarke] would emerge smiling and point out that if they had been live rounds, the occupants of the vehicle would no longer be in this world.’ This was all very well, ‘but it was of little consolation to the driver, who had to explain how the bodywork of his vehicle had been badly bashed.’

> He spent his leisure hours designing labour-saving domestic contraptions that proved rather less efficient than the weapons he had built during the war. His daughter-in-law Ann was on hand to see the test drive of his homespun pressure cooker. ‘It exploded,’ she said, ‘and bits of chicken had to be picked out of the kitchen ceiling.’ Indeed everything that Cecil touched in that post-war period seemed to explode, even his jars of homemade tomato soup. They blew up in the larder, splattering everything with fermented juice. ( )

It's ok, not spectacular. If I were in the UK, I might feel differently, but references to towns and areas of Great Britain mean nothing to me. There's an awful lot of "jolly good" British slang and extraneous words thrown in as well that seems to distract from the story-telling. The best parts of the story are the parts where Milton actually describes some of the guerrilla war activities as they take place. The 1st half of the book is fairly tedious as we learn about the personality of the main characters, the buildings and rooms they inhabit, their first attempts at designing weapons that will have an impact in the war (most of those early ones didn't have any impact at all), etc. I consider myself a serious student of WWII, so am glad to see a study done on a group of people that has been neglected by history. But I'm fairly disappointed with the overall result. ( )

In 1939, Churchill brought together a group of six men whose job was to fight "dirty," as it became clear that guerrilla warfare and innovative weapons might be the only way to beat Hitler. This group of out-of-the-box thinkers used everything from hard candies that dissolved in ocean water to higher mathematics to design bombs and plots that would foil Hitler's plans.
Although at times I felt the book gets bogged down in the bureaucracy of it all (I'd start skimming at the details of who hired whom), there are other places where the book reads like a series of daring, bizarre escapades. My favorite account, toward the end, was about a small group of men who parachuted into Norway to destroy a heavy water plant that Hitler would have used to build an atomic bomb. The fact that they landed in a dense blizzard, then (by sheer luck) literally bumped into a solitary hut that sheltered them for four days until the blizzard ended, confounded Nazi resistance, found their resistance counterparts, scaled a huge cliff, on top of which stood the factory, and managed to set off the bombs and escape without significant injury is ... well, it could be a GREAT movie.
What also fascinated me was that the notion of "(un)gentlemanly warfare" in 1939 was produced discursively, in an argument on the Letters page of the London *Times*. One writer claimed that the sword was the only weapon appropriate for a gentleman, as it gave both fellows a chance and made it a "sporting affair." But--another writer pointed out--did it really matter if one cut the enemy's jugular with a sword or a bayonet? This book spends some time tracing the process by which the English eventually acknowledged that Hitler was no longer playing by rules that governed earlier wars. As I read, I had some compassion for Chamberlain; he didn't want to acknowledge that difference--perhaps because it suggested many other kinds of loss. The very definitions of words such as fairness and justice and decency were changing.
I stole this book from my husband's nightstand after we began watching ATLANTIC CROSSING on PBS. I found this book a good companion to the series, which begins in Norway in 1939 and follows the Crown Princess of Norway to America, where she influences FDR's thoughts and policies on the war. I would recommend to fans of WWII true history and of books such as Eric Larson's THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE. ( )

Really enjoyed this book - amazing to read how important the work of these men and women was to the war effort. ( )