Ben Macintyre

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Ben Macintyre
BornBenedict Richard Pierce MacIntyre
25 December 1963 (1963-12-25) (age 60)
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England
OccupationColumnist, author
NationalityBritish
Spouse Kate Muir (div.)
Children3

Benedict Richard Pierce Macintyre (born 25 December 1963) is a British author, reviewer [1] and columnist for The Times newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.

Contents

Early life

Macintyre was born on 25 December 1963, in Oxford, the elder son [2] of Angus Donald Macintyre (d. 1994), a fellow and tutor in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, who was elected principal of Hertford College, Oxford before his death in a car accident, author of the first scholarly work on the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, general editor of the Oxford Historical Monographs series from 1971 to 1979, editor of The English Historical Review from 1978 to 1986, and Chairman of the Governors of Magdalen College School from 1987 to 1990, and Joanna, daughter of Sir Richard Musgrave Harvey, 2nd Baronet and a descendant of Berkeley Paget. [3] [4] His paternal grandmother was a descendant of James Netterville, 7th Viscount Netterville. [5]

Macintyre was educated at Abingdon School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in history in 1985. [6]

Career

Macintyre is the author of a book on the gentleman criminal Adam Worth, The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief.

He also wrote The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (about Josiah Harlan). This was also published as Josiah the Great: The True Story of the Man who Would be King. [7] Harlan is one of the candidates presumed to be the basis for Rudyard Kipling's short story The Man Who Would Be King .

He is the author of a book on Eddie Chapman, a double agent of Germany and Britain during the World War II, Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy.

In 2008, Macintyre wrote an illustrated account of Ian Fleming, creator of the fictional spy James Bond, to accompany the For Your Eyes Only, Ian Fleming and James Bond exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum, which was part of the Fleming Centenary celebrations. [8] [9]

Macintyre's 2020 book Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy, a biography of Soviet agent Ursula Kuczynski, was featured on BBC Radio 4 as a Book of the Week. [10]

In 2022 his book Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle was released, a history of the German prison and its inhabitants, mostly British POWs. The book received generally favorable reviews. [11]

In 2024 it was announced Viking will publish Macintyre's The Siege about the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980. [12]

Personal life

Macintyre has three children and is divorced from the writer and documentary maker Kate Muir.[ citation needed ]

Documentaries

Five of Macintyre's books have been made into documentaries for the BBC:

Adaptations

In 2021, Operation Mincemeat , a cinematic adaptation of Macintyre's 2010's homonymous book, subtitled The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II, premiered at Australia's British Film Festival, and was released to the public in 2022.

Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War, was adapted in 2022 under the title SAS: Rogue Heroes and released on 30 October 2022. [18] [19]

On 8 December 2022, a six part series titled A Spy Among Friends premiered on the streaming service ITVX. It's the adaptation of Macintyre's book: A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. [20]

In April 2023 it was announced that the team behind A Spy Among Friends (actor Damian Lewis and director Alexander Cary) is developing further television dramas based on Macintyre books. [21]

In 2007, Tom Hanks bought the rights to Macintyre's Agent Zigzag. [22] The film has been in various stages of development since. [23]

Awards and honours

Works

See also

Related Research Articles

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Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a British intelligence officer and a spy for the Soviet Union. In 1963, he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring that had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been the most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.

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Operation Mincemeat was a successful British deception operation of the Second World War to disguise the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. Two members of British intelligence obtained the body of Glyndwr Michael, a tramp who died from eating rat poison, dressed him as an officer of the Royal Marines and placed personal items on him identifying him as the fictitious Captain William Martin. Correspondence between two British generals that suggested that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, with Sicily as merely the target of a feint, was also placed on the body.

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Operation Waterfall was part of Operation Barclay, which was a deception to try to trick the Germans into thinking the Allies would land elsewhere in the Mediterranean other than Sicily, where they were going to land. It involved creating a decoy army in the eastern Mediterranean to make it look like they were targeting the Balkans. The Anglo-American force also created some dummy inflatable tanks and vehicles.

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The Man Who Never Was is a 1953 book by Ewen Montagu about the World War II Operation Mincemeat. Montagu played a leading role in the 1943 scheme to deceive the Germans about the planned Allied invasion of Sicily. The scheme entailed releasing a dead body just off the coast of Spain, where strong currents caused it to drift ashore in an area where a skilled German secret agent was known to operate. The corpse was to appear to be the victim of an airplane crash, the non-existent Royal Marine Captain William Martin, who had letters in a briefcase that hinted at a forthcoming Allied invasion of Greece and Sardinia, rather than the obvious target of Sicily.

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The Great Betrayal may refer to:

The faked sabotage at De Havilland Factory was a successful British deception operation of the Second World War at the De Havilland Mosquito aircraft factory in Hatfield, England. The fake sabotage was conducted during the night of January 29–30, 1943 and was designed to fool German reconnaissance aircraft into believing that a large bomb had detonated inside the factory's power plant. With the help of Jasper Maskelyne, a professional magician, and a team of camouflage experts, replica sub-transformers were created out of wood and papier-mâché, buildings were camouflaged, and debris was littered around the plant to create the appearance from the air that it was damaged by an explosion. Eddie Chapman, a British double agent, was used to inform the Abwehr of the success of the "attack", which is what his German handlers sent him to England to do. The ruse proved successful in fooling the Abwehr, and Chapman was even awarded the Iron Cross as a reward for his work.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Cholmondeley (intelligence officer)</span> British intelligence officer known for his leading role in Operation Mincemeat

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References

  1. Macintyre, Ben (12 October 1997). "Gaslight". The New York Times .
  2. He has an elder sister, born 1962, and a younger brother, born 1971, per Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 2, ed. Charles Mosley, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 2003, p. 1812
  3. Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th edition, vol. 2, ed. Charles Mosley, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 2003, p. 1812
  4. "OBITUARIES : Angus Macintyre". Independent.co.uk . 22 October 2011.
  5. Burke's Irish Family Records, ed. Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 1976, p. 358
  6. 'Cambridge University Tripos Results', The Guardian, 5 July 1985.
  7. Macintyre, Ben; Josiah the Great: The True Story of the Man who Would be King; HarperCollins; 2004, 350pp; ISBN   9780007151066
  8. Macintyre, Ben, Imperial War Museum;For Your Eyes Only, Ian Fleming and James Bond; Bloomsbury Publishing; London; 2008; 224pp; ISBN   978-1-5969-1544-2
  9. Imperial War Museum catalogue number LBY 08 / 802
  10. "Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre". BBC RADIO 4. BBC. Retrieved 30 September 2021.
  11. "Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle" . Retrieved 7 March 2023.
  12. "Viking announces the 'definitive' history of the London Iranian embassy siege from Ben Macintyre". The Bookseller. Retrieved 26 July 2024.
  13. Walker George Films: Operation Mincemeat
  14. Walker George Films: DOUBLE AGENT: The Eddie Chapman Story
  15. Walker George Films: Double Cross – The True Story of the D Day Spies
  16. "Kim Philby - His Most Intimate Betrayal". BBC TWO. BBC. Retrieved 30 September 2021.
  17. "SAS: Rogue Warriors". BBC TWO. BBC. Retrieved 30 September 2021.
  18. Beevor, Antony (22 September 2022). "'This is rock-star history!' – Antony Beevor on the gung-ho brilliance of SAS Rogue Heroes". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 22 September 2022.
  19. Macintyre, Ben (2017). SAS: Rogue Heroes (Paperback ed.). London: Penguin. ISBN   978-0-241-18686-2.
  20. "A Spy Among Friends review – don't take your eyes off this star-packed espionage thriller". BBC TWO. The Guardian. Retrieved 11 December 2022.
  21. White, Peter (16 April 2023). "Damian Lewis & Alexander Cary Adapting More Ben Macintryre Books For TV After 'A Spy Among Friends'". Deadline. Retrieved 9 July 2024.
  22. Kit, Borys (20 September 2007). "Tom Hanks, studio double up on spy saga". Reuters . Retrieved 9 July 2024.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  23. "Bomback writing 'Agent Zigzag' for Hanks". Digital Spy. 20 March 2009. Retrieved 9 July 2024.
  24. "The Baillie Gifford Prize 2018 announces shortlist". Baillie Gifford Prize. 2 October 2018. Retrieved 3 October 2018.
  25. See Nueva Germania and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
  26. "THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING: The First American in Afghanistan by Ben Macintyre". publishersweekly.com . Retrieved 10 December 2022.
  27. Harding, Luke (19 September 2018). "Review of The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre". The Guardian.
  28. Feigel, Lara (30 September 2020). "Review of Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre". The Guardian.