Roderick Bailey: Target: Italy

Roderick Bailey was able to draw on long-classified documents for his dazzling recreation of the cloak-and-dagger war fought by British secret agents in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) against Mussolini's Fascist Italy during the Second World War, which climaxed in one of the most extraordinary episodes of the whole conflict. Now stationed as a historian at the University of Oxford, Bailey was commissioned by the Cabinet Office to pen the official history of the war waged by the SOE. His account is incredibly pacy and readable, telling the story from both sides and recounting exploits so daring and implausible (for example, a little-known plot to assassinate Il Duce in 1942) that - if this were fiction - they would be dismissed as implausible. Here is the author speaking to the Faber Podcast.