2010-09-26 · in Books · 141 words

What Roald Dahl got up to during the Second World War, after the events he retells in "Going Solo" (which I last read when I was probably far too young to appreciate it): he worked in Washington as part of a low-key British intelligence unit, encouraging US support for the war in Europe. This appears to have consisted mostly of making influential friends and trading useful information with them.

The book reads rather like a very long magazine article, but it's spectacularly detailed, and it's all properly referenced and indexed, which is nice. If there's anything to complain about here it's that Dahl didn't really get up to anything terribly exciting in the US — but that's hardly Conant's fault! Now I need to look out for a copy of the official history that Dahl had a hand in writing...