Sunday Times Chief Political Commentator and spy book fan Tim Shipman talks with Ben Macintyre about his latest work based on Colditz, Prisoners of the Castle.
The “entertaining yet objective and often-moving account” (The Wall Street Journal) of one of history’s most notorious prisons—and the remarkable cast of POWs who tried relentlessly to escape their captors, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor
In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend.
But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs.
Prisoners of the Castle traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.
Books And Resources mentioned in this episode of Spies and Books - Spybrary with Ben MacIntyre
On His Majesty's Secret Service - Interview with Charlie Higson
A Very Working Class Spy with Gordon Henderson MP
Decoding Funeral In Berlin starring Michael Caine with Spybrary's Section F
Ian Fleming's Thunderball- The James Bond Book Club
Jonna Mendez - A Woman's Life in the CIA Unmasked
Spies, Murder and Justice in Northern Ireland with Henry Hemming
The Spy Game Books with Writer Michael Frost Beckner
Tom Fletcher 'The Ultimate Downing Street Operator' and Spy Author in Conversation with Spybrary
Ian Fleming's For Your Eyes Only- The James Bond Book Club
Unpacking Beirut Station with Author Paul Vidich
Ian Fleming The Complete Man with Biographer Nicholas Shakespeare
James Bond After Fleming: The Continuation 007 Novels with Mark Edlitz
The Third Man - Movie Reviewed by Spybrary's Section F (Films) Panel
Dead Drop 5 with Jeff Circle of The Writers Dossier
My Five Best Spy Books With Dr Mark Pack, President of the UK's Liberal Democrats
The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination with Stuart A Reid
My Five Best Spy Books with Martin Paul
A Spy Alone - Interview with Charles Beaumont, Former MI6 Officer Turned Author
Tim Shipman in Conversation with David McCloskey, Author of Moscow X
Moscow X by David McCloskey - Spy Book Review!
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