Fitzroy Maclean · 1949 · global

Fitzroy Maclean's 1949 memoir, in three parts and three wars. A young diplomat in Stalin's Moscow watches the show trials and then travels illegally through Soviet Central Asia; resigns to enlist as a private; ends up raiding airfields with the SAS in the Western Desert; and is finally parachuted into Yugoslavia as Churchill's envoy to Tito.

1. 1
   Moscow

   Posted to the Moscow embassy in the late thirties, Maclean sits in the gallery at the purge trials watching old Bolsheviks confess to impossible things - and spends his leave travelling where foreigners may not go.

2. 2
   Samarkand

   He reaches Soviet Central Asia by a series of trains, evasions and flat refusals to turn back - and stands in front of the Registan at Samarkand, which almost no westerner of his generation had been allowed to see.

3. 3
   Bokhara

   At Bokhara, shadowed continuously by the NKVD and repeatedly turned round at stations, he keeps going anyway - the whole Central Asian section being an extended demonstration that persistence beats permission.

4. 4
   Cairo

   War comes and he resigns the Foreign Office to enlist in the ranks, gets into Parliament in order to get out of it, and turns up in Cairo attached to David Stirling's new and disreputable Special Air Service.

5. 5
   Benghazi

   With the SAS he raids deep behind the line in the Western Desert - and drives into Benghazi in a captured car to blow up shipping, on an operation whose planning consists largely of confidence and a good accent.

6. 6
   Drvar

   In 1943 he parachutes into Yugoslavia as Churchill's envoy to Tito, to establish who is actually fighting the Germans - and spends the rest of the war in the mountains with the partisans.