by Mark Simmons | Jan 17, 2025 | Uncategorized
Let’s give the book its full title ‘Agent Cicero: Hitler’s most successful Spy’ was first published by Spellmount, an imprint of The History Press in 2014 up to then my third book with them. I loved the cover and still do. This book was a slow...
by Mark Simmons | Jan 9, 2025 | Uncategorized
I always like to re-read an old favourite book during the year the last book of last year I read was John Steinbeck’s masterpiece East of Eden. Looking at my old battered paperback edition it is the 5th time I have read it. Although I’m sure somehow it is...
by Mark Simmons | Dec 13, 2024 | Uncategorized
So we played Rangers again last night almost 62 years to the day and I have been supporting the Lillywhites that long. Nine years old I was living in Scotland in 1962 Dad was in the Navy serving on the submarine depot ship HMS Maidstone, at the Faslane Submarine base....
by Mark Simmons | Dec 9, 2024 | Uncategorized
The author Nevil Shute was many things in his varied life other than a much loved writer, who can forget classics like The Far Country or A Town like Alice. Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 – 12 January 1960) was an English novelist and aeronautical...
by Mark Simmons | Dec 7, 2024 | Uncategorized
by Mark Simmons | Nov 6, 2024 | Uncategorized
‘Operation Judgement’. ‘During the attack a hundred thousand rounds were fired at us but only one aircraft was shot down in each wave. I got hit underneath by one half-inch machine gun bullet. It was the pilot’s job to aim the torpedo. Nobody was given a specific...
by Mark Simmons | Sep 15, 2024 | Uncategorized
by Mark Simmons | Aug 13, 2024 | Uncategorized
1 The 39 Steps John Buchan. I think it has to be on everybody’s list written by Buchan while he was ill in bed at the start of the First World War and published in 1915. It has great pace and a riveting plot no wonder the soldiers in the trenches were enthralled, and...
by Mark Simmons | Aug 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
In August 1909, a semi retired, Naval Commander aged fifty, and living on a houseboat near Southampton devising boom defences for rivers and harbours, received an odd written request. The letter was from Rear Admiral Bethell, Director of Naval Intelligence. It advised...
by Mark Simmons | Aug 8, 2024 | Uncategorized
The great American writer William Faulkner in his unique literary voice wrote of Pickett’s charge in his novel Intruder in the Dust and tells us the whole South wanted and still wants to be there at Gettysburg on the 3 July 1863: ‘…the brigades are in position...
