Ben Macintyre | |
---|---|
Born | Benedict Richard Pierce MacIntyre 25 December 1963 (age 60) Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK |
Occupation | Columnist, author |
Nationality | British |
Spouse | Kate Muir (div.) |
Children | 3 |
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.
Macintyre was born on 25 December 1963, in Oxford, United Kingdom, the elder son [2] of Angus Donald Macintyre (d. 1994), a fellow and tutor in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford at the University of 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 at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in history in 1985. [6]
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 .
His 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]
Macintyre has three children and is divorced from the writer and documentary maker Kate Muir.[ citation needed ]
Five of Macintyre's books have been made into documentaries for the BBC:
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. [17] [18]
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. [19]
Edward Arnold Chapman was an English criminal and wartime spy. During the Second World War he offered his services to Nazi Germany as a spy and subsequently became a British double agent. His British Secret Service handlers codenamed him Agent Zigzag in acknowledgement of his erratic personal history.
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British writer, best known for his postwar James Bond series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing.
The Cambridge Five was a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the Soviet Union during the Second World War and the Cold War and was active from the 1930s until at least the early 1950s. None of the known members were ever prosecuted for spying. The number and membership of the ring emerged slowly, from the 1950s onwards.
Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild,, was a British scientist, intelligence officer during World War II, and later a senior executive with Royal Dutch Shell and N M Rothschild & Sons, and an advisor to the Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher governments of the UK. He was a member of the prominent Rothschild family.
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.
A number of real-life inspirations have been suggested for James Bond, the fictional character created in 1953 by British author, journalist and former Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming (1908–1964); Bond appeared in twelve novels and nine short stories by Fleming, as well as a number of continuation novels and twenty-six films, with seven actors playing the role of Bond.
Operation Goldeneye was an Allied stay-behind plan during the Second World War to monitor Spain after a possible alliance between Francisco Franco and the Axis powers, and to undertake sabotage operations. The plan was formed by Commander Ian Fleming of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID). No German takeover of Spain took place, nor an invasion of Gibraltar, and the plan was shelved in 1943. Fleming later used the name for his Jamaican home where he wrote the James Bond stories.
Ewen Edward Samuel Montagu was a British judge, Naval intelligence officer, and author.
Major William Martin was a persona invented by British Military Intelligence for Operation Mincemeat, the Second World War deception plan that lured German forces to Greece prior to the Allied invasion of Sicily. Also known as "the man who never was", Martin's personal details were created to lend credence to the scheme, which involved a body, dressed as a British officer and carrying secret documents, to wash up on shores of neutral Spain, apparently the victim of an air crash. It was intended that these documents, containing information that suggested an Allied assault on Greece was planned, should fall into the hands of German intelligence.
Captain Alan Hugh Hillgarth (1899–1978) was a British adventure novelist and member of the intelligence services, perhaps best known for his activities in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War. Hillgarth appears as one of the actual historical figures in C. J. Sansom's 2006 novel, Winter in Madrid, and also in María Dueñas's 2009 novel, El tiempo entre costuras, as well its Spanish-language 2013 television adaptation.
The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography was established in 2003 in memory of Elizabeth Longford (1906-2002), the British author, biographer and historian. The £5,000 prize is awarded annually for a historical biography published in the preceding year.
John Nicholas Rede Elliott was an MI6 intelligence officer. His MI6 career was notable for his involvement with the Lionel Crabb affair in the 1950s and the flight of double agent Kim Philby to Moscow in 1963.
Ronald Thomas Reed was a BBC radio engineer who became an MI5 officer in 1940, and ran double agents during World War II.
Major Karl-Erich Kühlenthal was a German spy and one of the most senior Abwehr agents in Spain during World War II.
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.
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.
Alexis Freiherr von Rönne was a German Army colonel and senior intelligence analyst. He became one of Hitler's favoured officers in the Abwehr, despite secretly being of anti-Nazi persuasion.
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.
SAS: Rogue Heroes is a British historical drama television series created by Steven Knight, which depicts the origins of the British Army Special Air Service (SAS) during the Western Desert Campaign of World War II. The storyline is a broadly accurate representation of real events, as described by Ben Macintyre in his 2016 book of the same name.