Airey Neave – författare

The defense of Calais in May/June 1940 was a superb example of selfless courage and sacrifice. Sent by Churchill to divert the Germans from Dunkirk and so save the British Army from total annihilation and capture, 29 Brigade had orders not to evacuate or surrender. Airey Neave, later to be Margaret Thatcher's right hand man until his assassination in 1979, was one of those who fought, and was wounded and captured there

Saturday at M.I.9 is the inside story of the underground escape lines in occupied North-West Europe which brought back to Britain over 4,000 Allied servicemen during World War Two.Airey Neave, who in the last two years of the war was the chief organiser at M.I.9 gives his own unique account. He describes how the escape lines began in the first dark days of German occupation and how, until the end of the war, thousands of ordinary men and women made their own contribution to the Allied victory by hiding and feeding men and guiding them to safety."There isn't a page in the book which isn't exciting in incident, wise in judgment, and absorbing through its human involvement." Times Literary Supplement.Airey Neave was the first British POW to make a 'home run' from Colditz Castle. On his return he joined M.I.9 adopting the code name Saturday. He was involved in the Nuremburg war trials. His World War II memoir "They Have Their Exits" was republished by Pen & Sword in 2002 and his classic account of the fall of Calais'Flames of Calais' is being republished in 2003. Airey Neave's life was tragically cut short by the IRA who assassinated him in 1979 when he was one of Margaret Thatcher's closest political allies.

The Author, who as a senior member of Mrs Thatcher's Government was tragically assassinated by the IRA, had the most distinguished of war records. Wounded and taken prisoner in the desperate fighting at Calais in 1940, he became a compulsive escaper and the first one of the very few to make a 'home-run' from Colditz Castle. Thereafter he rejoined the fighting serving in France and Holland before becoming a member of the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremburg War Crimes trials. There he was to meet the most notorious members of the Nazi hierarchy as they faced justice and, in many cases, death. For the quality of its writing and the breadth of its author's experiences, They Have Their Exits is arguably the finest memoir to emerge from the Second World War, and one for which the sobriquet 'classic' seems wholly inadequate.