Description
A follow-up to the best-selling biography Chink', this selection from private letters and intimate war diary has the impact of a fresh no holds barred' autobiography. Dorman-Smith the man flesh and blood comes alive here on the page. Provocative, irreverent, caustic and witty, his disdain for Churchill and for the Establishment in general increases as his military career unravels. Egotistical? Yes. Arrogant? Certainly. His own worst enemy? Perhaps. But Dorman Smith's grasp of tactics and strategy was unsurpassed, as his exchanges with Basil Liddell-Hart demonstrate. Full of contradictions, he was externally reserved and inwardly super-sensitive. Growing up in style in Ireland and educated at public school in England, his religion was Catholic and he scorned any Anglo-Irish tag. His private life while rising up the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers proved colourful, while a brief dalliance with the IRA in the 1950s never endangered his vow of silence over the Enigma/Ultra secret.
