Churchill's Iceman: The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke: Genius, Fugitive, Spy - Rilegato

Hemming, Henry

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1848094434 ISBN 13: 9781848094437

Casa editrice: Preface Publishing, 2014

Riassunto

There is no reason why you should have heard of Geoffrey Pyke. After his suicide in 1948 he was described as one of the great geniuses of his time, to rank alongside Einstein, yet he remains today, as The Times put it, ‘one of the most original if unrecognised figures’ of the twentieth century.

Inventor, escapee, campaigner, war correspondent, Pyke was an unlikely hero of both world wars and is seen today as the father of the U.S. Special Forces. He changed the landscape of British pre-school education, earned a fortune on the stock market, wrote a bestseller and in 1942 convinced Churchill and Lord Mountbatten to build an aircraft carrier out of reinforced ice. He gave birth to the Mass Observation movement, escaped from a German concentration camp, devised an ingenious plan to get ambulances and microscopes to the Spanish Republicans for free and launched a private attempt to avert the outbreak of the Second World War by sending into Nazi Germany a group of pollsters disguised as golfers. But there was another side to this man. Pyke, it seems, was a man with a secret.

In 2009 MI5 released a mass of material suggesting that Pyke was in fact a senior official in the Soviet Comintern. In 1951 papers relating to Pyke were found in the flat of ‘Cambridge Spy’ Guy Burgess after his defection to Moscow. MI5 had ‘watchers’ follow Pyke through the bombed-out streets of London, his letters were opened and listening devices picked up clues to his real identity. Convinced he was a Soviet agent codenamed ‘Professor P’, MI5 helped to bring his career to an end.

It is only now, more than sixty years after his death, that Geoffrey Pyke's astonishing story can be told in full. Churchill’s Iceman is a many-faceted account of this enigmatic man’s genius, and reveals him as one of the great innovators of the last century.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"The papers that MI5 released in 2009 have led to the discovery of a wonderful new subject for modern biography. Geoffrey Pyke was a tragic and lonely genius who attempted to plant new ideas into the unresponsive soil of Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. His final wish "to be forgotten as if I had never lived" has now been dramatically eclipsed by this amazing story of mystery and adventure. It is as if he had been invented by G. K. Chesterton and given posthumous fame by John le Carré – which underlines the extraordinary accomplishment of his actual biographer Henry Hemming." (Michael Holroyd)

"His was not a lucky life but, in his biographer, he has gained a little bit of posthumous luck. This admirable and thoroughly enjoyable book should rescue a weirdly original and innovative talent from oblivion" (The Sunday Times)

"A biography that reads wonderfully like an adventure story and looks set to restore to Pyke the fame he deserves... Hemming’s great achievement is to turn the story of a nerdish chameleon into a page-turner and to make someone hitherto unknown seem crucial to his century" (Guardian)

Descrizione del libro:

The extraordinary story of Geoffrey Pyke – one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Preface Publishing
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1848094434
• ISBN 13: 9781848094437
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 544