The singer and artist Tommy Steele, who was the author of the Final Run,  told the story that sometime after the second world war he discovered that his grandfather had been one of a group of Churchill lookalikes used to disguise and decoy the movements of the real wartime prime minister – an idea famously used in Jack Higgins’ “The Eagle has landed”. Taking this as a starting point he builds a very efficient thriller to imagine how such ruses could have been used to effect a pause in the German advance on Dunkirk.

Steele displays an impressive cold-heartedness in his imagining of how such a plot might play out. The historical liberties he takes never lose sight of either the ruthless efficiency or sadism of the Nazis.

The book compares favourably to the work of, for example, Higgins – not great literature but fine entertainment: a war thriller that does exactly what it says on the tin.

On holidays on the island of Vis a few years ago I came across a memorial to British commandos in the harbour of Komisa. I found this book after I got home, a non-fiction novel told from the perspective of the real British doctors who worked on the island, in and around Komisa, when it was one of the few bits of Croatia unoccupied by the Germans.

The author, himself a veteran of the war in the Eastern Mediterranean, had clearly taken the time to visit the island as the accounts he gathered are precisely rooted in the geography of the island – its possible to find and follow the roads described in the story and find the locations of many of the incidents. And, while the story is told from the perspectives of the allies and based on the accounts of allied combatants, particularly the doctors on the island, it does not shy away from the nastier aspects of the war: the beautiful island I could see from the window of my holiday apartment, for example, is identified as the place that the Partisans took both German prisoners and their own people judged guilty of infractions to execute them.

Overall a facinating and engagingly written story of deeply likeable people in a bloody but forgotten corner of the bloodiest of wars.

Liam O’Flaherty’s 1950 novel is an account of a small group of rebels progress through Easter Week 1916, starting with the storming of the General Post Office, through an action clearly based on the intense fighting around Mount Street Bridge, to the final hours around the GPO leading up to the surrender.

As in his books Skerrit and The Informer, O’Flaherty’s principle protagonist is a pretty dim one, in this case a Connemara man Bartley Madden, who is transformed, though not intellectually, by his experiences during the novel. How much you enjoy having a Stage Irishman at the centre of the novel you are reading is probably a matter of personal taste, but I could have done without it. Such a device seems to have been chosen by O’Flaherty in order to explore his political and philosophical ideas, and it is these more than the fighting that are central to his concerns in this novel.

And, unfortunately this makes for a rather unbelievable and clumsy novel. Pages are taken up with philosophical and cod-philosophical discourse. Perhaps this is how soldiers, most particularly citizen-soldiers, spend their time in battle. But even if it rings true I found many of their conversations uninteresting and the view of O’Flaherty, who had been a combatant in both the first world war and the struggles around Irish independence, bleak.

Those who know a little about the 1916 rising will recognise that O’Flaherty is generally faithful to the course of events and the geography of Dublin. However if one is searching for a gripping introduction to the 1916 rebellion, Charles Townsend’s historical account is both more informative and, for me, much more exciting.