The thrilling tale of six days that changed Britain forever

Ben Macintyre’s unputdownable new book The Siege’ tells the story of an SAS op like no other, writes Robert McCrum

- Robert McCrum

Inevitably, it was Winston Churchill who captured the thrill of Britain’s secret state. “In the higher ranges of Secret Service work,” he once wrote, “the actual facts were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true.”

Those splendid words could stand as an epigraph to Ben Macintyre’s bestselling oeuvres. From Operation Mincemeat to Colditz to Rogue Heroes, a history of the SAS, Macintyre has not merely burnished the glamour of Churchill’s description. From many points of view, Macintyre has given a joyous new lease of life to the romance of the dark side in matters of state.

British readers – and anglophiles worldwide – long for the kind of history that’s entertaining, slightly mad, and unputdownable, populated by charming, square-jawed protagonists who are not quite what they seem. With this audience, you can bet the farm on a ripping post-imperial yarn. But here’s the delightful thing about history: it has its own inscrutable logic.

Who, for instance, would have guessed that a dreary May bank holiday would witness a special forces action that would shock the world and give a sinister new meaning to “Who Dares Wins”? In brief, when the SAS executed an operation that fell far short of Churchill’s “inventions of romance and melodrama”, they were not a quarter of a mile from Harvey Nichols.