Our next event is on Wednesday 22nd January 2020. 7.30pm in the Priory Road Complex.
Patrick Bishop
The Battle of Britain
Patrick Bishop has emerged in the last decade as one of Britain’s best-regarded military historians with his books Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys, which cast a new light on the men who flew in the Battle of Britain and the Strategic Air Campaign.
He has also led the field in contemporary accounts of the experiences of British troops fighting in southern Afghanistan. His 3 Para told the story of the initial break-in battle in Helmand in 2006 and won the British Army Military Book of the Year Award. He joined the Paras on their return to southern Afghanistan in 2008 and produced a sequel, Ground Truth.
His writing is underpinned by first-hand knowledge of warfare gained during a long career as a foreign corresponent. He has followed British soldiers on almost all their deployments of the last thirty years from the Falklands to Afghanistan.
He is also the author of two novels, A Good War (2008) and Follow Me Home, which has been described as ‘the first great novel of the Afghan war.’(Major Chris Hunter).
His 2009 book The Battle of Britain is a riveting chronicle of the epic struggle between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe. It is the story of Britain’s fight for national survival, from the shock defeat and evacuation from Dunkirk in May/June 1940 to fighter Command’s assertion of superiority over the Luftwaffe in mid-September. Battle of Britain takes the reader through that summer day by day, revealing the ongoing battle’s impact on flyers and civilians alike. By enhancing his narrative with eye-witness accounts, diary extracts and pilot profiles, Bishop brings the often horrific reality of air combat vividly to life. In Battle of Britain Patrick Bishop has written the definitive account of one of the pivotal moments in twentieth-century British history, and a nation’s ‘finest hour’.
