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| A Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson by Peter J Conradi – review | A Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson by Peter J Conradi – review |
| (2 months later) | |
| In 1944, while on Balkan manoeuvres with a rag-tag brigade of Bulgarian Partisans, 23-year-old British liaison officer Frank Thompson was captured by pro-Nazi gendarmeries, tortured and executed. In this exhaustive account of Thompson's all-too-brief life, Conradi presents a portrait of the second world war from the perspective of England's leftwing bohemian intelligentsia: Frank was the son of the poet Edward Thompson, elder brother of EP Thompson (who would go on to write The Making of the English Working Class), and while at Cambridge was a member of the Communist party and courted Iris Murdoch. He was also an aspiring writer and poet who, in his last letter home to Murdoch shortly before his death, wrote that his number one priority was "people, and everything to do with people, their habits, their loves, their hates, their arts, their languages". If the tone is a little didactic at times and the prose occasionally bogged down by military minutiae, such concerns are tempered by the obvious affection Conradi has for his subject – this most unlikely of soldiers. | In 1944, while on Balkan manoeuvres with a rag-tag brigade of Bulgarian Partisans, 23-year-old British liaison officer Frank Thompson was captured by pro-Nazi gendarmeries, tortured and executed. In this exhaustive account of Thompson's all-too-brief life, Conradi presents a portrait of the second world war from the perspective of England's leftwing bohemian intelligentsia: Frank was the son of the poet Edward Thompson, elder brother of EP Thompson (who would go on to write The Making of the English Working Class), and while at Cambridge was a member of the Communist party and courted Iris Murdoch. He was also an aspiring writer and poet who, in his last letter home to Murdoch shortly before his death, wrote that his number one priority was "people, and everything to do with people, their habits, their loves, their hates, their arts, their languages". If the tone is a little didactic at times and the prose occasionally bogged down by military minutiae, such concerns are tempered by the obvious affection Conradi has for his subject – this most unlikely of soldiers. |
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