Bomber

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As an accessible documentary of the campaign, Deighton is unflinchingly accurate in blending fact with the necessary mechanics of characterisation. My appreciation of this book is Deighton’s acute attention to detail in the development of its locales, characters, procedures, and equipment described page by page.

While in New York City working as a magazine illustrator he began writing his first novel, ‘The Ipcress File’, which was published in 1962. Thousands upon thousands of warriors and civilians on both sides died horrible deaths and in a war that was, without a doubt, hell on earth. If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.It's probably impossible to remember all one hundred characters but one comes to care a great deal for almost all of them, whether British or German.

Although he has written scores of novels, history and military history, and many cookbooks, Deighton is probably best known for the ten books about MI6 intelligence officer Bernard Samson. As for his writing, it's smooth as always, but the glibness he displays in his spy novels here becomes an unsettling detachment as he describes the dismemberment, disembowelment, and disintegration of characters with whom the reader has just spent the last several hundred pages. Len Deighton’s devastating novel is a gripping minute-by-minute account of what happens over the next twenty-four hours. But he began his professional career as a book and magazine illustrator after graduating from the Royal College of Art. There is probably a mix of shame and the feeling everything is just too random to make a story seem meaningful.

Anthony Burgess named it one of the top 100 English-language novels of the postwar period, putting Deighton in the same company as Naipaul, Nabokov, Bellow, Roth and Salinger. He also interviewed many British and German veterans and civilians and flew in most of the planes described in the book. The British strategy to send hundreds of planes, night after night, to bomb the civilian areas of German cities was based on the decisions of Arthur Harris, head of the RAF Bomber Command.