Patrick Leigh Fermor, legendary travel writer and Special Operations Executive officer, never published during his own lifetime this, his full account of the kidnap of General Kreipe in Crete in 1944. His junior SOE colleague Billy Moss did, with Leigh Fermor’s help. Ill Met by Moonlight was published in 1950 and made into a famous movie with Dirk Bogarde as Leigh Fermor.

However as Roderick Bailey points out in his foreword to this book, Billy Moss did not speak Greek and the Kriepe kidnapping was his first clandestine operation. So his account lacked understanding and appreciation of the Greek partisans with whom he fought.

Leigh Fermor’s account is therefore something of an apologia to pay proper tribute to the people upon whom he depended for his life during his years undercover in Crete. He notes towards the end of his account that, “There has been more than a hint in these pages of [the kindness and generosity of the Cretan people] and of that aspect of Cretan life which suddenly gives the phrase ‘Brotherhood in arms’ such meaning”.

It is this, rather than a desire to convey a “boy’s-own” adventure, which seems at the heart of this account. It is an account that is marked by a remarkable joie de vivre in spite of the harsh circumstances he describes, and the constant threat of death under which he lived. As such it contrasts interestingly with Eric Newby’s similarly themed, but altogether more melancholic, account of his time being sheltered by an impoverished Italian rural population while on the run from the Germans: Love and War in the Appenines.

Leigh-Fermor conceived of the kidnapping of the German commander in Crete as a bloodless operation, to prevent German reprisals against Cretan civilians. Originally he aimed to kidnap the brutal General Muller, but this plan was thwarted with Muller’s transfer and replacement with General Kreipe.

Leigh-Fermor went ahead with the plan anyway as a morale boosting exercise for the Cretan resistance, and to keep them distracted from shedding German blood and hence provoking fierce reprisals.

He almost achieved his bloodless coup, though his Cretan comrades were at one point compelled to leave the poor driver who had been captured with the General in an unmarked grave. And some months after the operation the Germans conducted a series of brutal reprisals anyway, which may, or may not have been linked to the kidnapping.

Given this, and the undertaking of the operation late in the war when Germany’s fate was all but decided the strategic value of the operation is open to question. But the courage and fortitude that it entailed is not, as Leigh Fermor’s account amply demonstrates. Abducting a General gives a fine insight into a little-known corner of the Second World War, prosecuted, in the main, by ordinary people at terrible cost.

Famously the Indian sub-continent freed itself from British rule through a non-violent struggle led by Gandhi. However rather than this being a great triumph for passive resistance, the efforts by Congress, the Muslim League, and the Sikh leadership to carve up the spoils more than made up for it in terms of bloodshed: the Partition of India saw one of the most horrendous blood baths of the 20th Century, and the largest forced migration in human history. Sometimes these two things coincided with trains of refugees pulling into their destination stations dripping with the blood of the women, children and men passengers who had been hacked to death in ambushes.

In Midnight’s Furies, Nishid Hajari details how the political calculations, petty jealousies, posturings, misjudgements and misunderstandings of the sub-continent’s political leaderships, in particular Jinnah and Nehru, led to the sectarian carnage that engulfed the creation of the modern states of India and Pakistan.

Hajari provides a much less sympathetic portrait of Nehru than Alex Von Tunzelman’s fine account of the same period, Indian Summer. For Hajari, Nehru failed in his responsibility as a statesman of obtaining some sort of rapprochement with Jinnah and the Muslim League, and hence undermined his vision of a secular India for all Indians. Hajari also portrays Nehru, at least in the early days of his premiership, as a man in office but not in control. His dream of a secular India uniting Hindu, Muslim and Sikh under a common citizenship bloodily undermined by the extraordinary violence of the period, which his administration seemed powerless to prevent.

Doubtless some of this was spontaneous communal violence drawing on obscure but profound local animosities and feuds. But much of it was not. Each community produced paramilitary forces, many of them highly professional as a result of the large numbers of former soldiers in their midst. These set to the butchery of their neighbours with a relish and ruthlessness that would not have been out of place in the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe a few years earlier.

This killing was frequently facilitated by the failures of Indian and Pakistani police and military to properly intervene to uphold the law. Sometimes the police and army stood idly by. Sometimes they became active participants in the slaughter.

In this regard they were echoing the equivocal leaderships of the two states: Jinnah appears to have missed the logical contradiction of wanting a secular republic for Muslims only. In India Hindus and Sikhs seemed to take their lead less from Nehru and more from Sadar Patel, the States minister in the Indian Union government. Patel regarded the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population as a good thing, purging the state of potential fifth columnists. He also regarded the neo-fascist RSSS with considerable warmth despite their butchery of tens of thousands ordinary Indians.

With such equivocal leadership at the heart of government it is unsurprising that so many police and troops turned a blind eye to the atrocities. To his credit, when able to do little else, Nehru time and again sought out and faced down Hindu murder squads, striving to personally halt the killing which so much of his own administration was acquiescing in. Order only finally began to be restored by the intervention of Nepalese Gurkha and Southern Indian troops, who were less given to the sectarian passions of the northerners. The assassination of Gandhi by a right wing Hindu also caused some pause to the likes of Patel and the rest of the nation who perhaps only then began to glimpse the lunacy that their sectarianism was bringing.

Hajari is particularly interested in the origins of Pakistan’s current disfunction and sponsorship of terrorism, something which he shows very well. However the book also casts significant light on the current disfunctionalities of the Indian state.

Shortly before the victory for Prime Minister Modi’s BJP in the Indian general election I spoke to an Indian friend about the anticipated result. He argued that there were three strands in the Indian independence movement: the Nehruist/Ambedkarist republican tradition which has been dominant for much of Indian history; a communist/socialist strand which has enjoyed power in some of the Indian states; and finally the Hindu Nationalist tradition which Modi was now bringing to power.

However from Hajari’s account this Hindu Nationalist tradition was a very dominant one in the first Indian government, constantly undermining the visions of Nehru and Ambedkar. The caste-based apartheid, the rapes and murders of girls and young women, the enslavement of vulnerable workers that disfigure contemporary India, the world’s largest democracy, may, at least in part, be seen to derive directly from the Hindu-nationalist vision that so bloodily asserted itself in 1947 and asserts itself still to the present day.

Midnight’s Furies is a beautifully written but harrowing account of the origins of India and Pakistan. It is an important book about the origins of a contemporary Cold War, about human beings’ inhumanity to other human beings, about how magnaminty and empathy are so vital to diplomacy, and how their absence can lead to carnage.

Sympathy for the Devil

Manhunt, as the subtitle indicates, is an account of the hunt for John Wilkes Booth and the cabal of bitter, reactionary racists who murdered the United States’ greatest president, Lincoln, and tried to kill his Vice President, Andrew Johnson, and his Secretary of State, William Seward.

Swanson succeeds well in his apparent objective of writing a non-fiction thriller based on the hunt for these assassins, and appears to have developed some sympathy for his subjects, presenting in detail their considerable bravery and endurance in the aftermath of the murder. Among the conspirators was Dr Samuel Mudd, who treated Booth when he was on the run. Mudd was imprisoned as a conspirator but he and his family subsequently worked for his exoneration, saying he was only doing his duty as a doctor and had no knowledge of Booth or the conspiracy. John Ford, a Lincolnphile, even immortalised this story in one of his films, The Prisoner of Shark Island.

Swanson argues however that Mudd was indeed part of the conspiracy and Booth’s encounter with him was no accident, but rather a rendezvous with a known sympathiser. The moral of this part of the story is that you can still say “his name is Mudd” with a clear conscience.

The book illuminates this aspect of the Civil War, often passed over or obscured in other texts by the monumental tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination. Amongst the startling details that Swanson reveals is that Booth obtained access to Lincoln’s presence merely by presenting his card: his brother was a friend of Lincoln and strong supporter of the Union so Booth was also welcomed as a friend.

Overall the book is a sobering reminder to the contemporary world that courage is not the highest of virtues but rather often facilitates some of the worst of human behaviour and can lead to some of the greatest pain and loss.

A Spy Among Friends is a study of the overlapping careers of three spies from the 1930s to the 60s: the MI6/KGB double agent, Kim Philby; his friend and fellow MI6 officer, Nicholas Elliot, and James Jesus Angelton, the CIA officer who befriended of Philby during the Second World War.

It is an elegantly written narrative, generally compelling, filled with anecdote (not least on some of Pope John XXIII’s resistance activities), and at times chilling, particularly regarding Philby’s betrayals to the KGB, including of German anti-Nazi resistance and of agents that he was personally running. Almost without exception these people were liquidated.

The psychology that could enable a person to commit such casual bloodshed is examined through the frame of Philby’s friendships with, and (less lethal) betrayals of Elliot, Angelton and his wives, all of whom fell for his charm, but never knew the real man.

I found Elliot, Philby’s friend, defender, and ultimately his accuser, though charming, not much more sympathetic than Philby. While loyal to his country and service his complacent class-ridden arrogance was a central feature in his presumption that his close friend Philby must be above suspicion merely because of his class and upbringing. MacIntyre’s research and a brief afterword by John le Carre, who met Elliot on a number of occasions, suggests that, while not treacherous, Elliot’s role in the final unmasking of Philby may not have been quite as honourable as he always maintained.

Overall the book is an entertaining excursion into a slice of Cold War history and a reminder of the perils of unquestioningly accepting the crass arrogance and privilege of the ruling classes.