A Kind of Greek

Jeremy Harding

  • BuyA Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson by Peter Conradi
    Bloomsbury, 419 pp, £18.99, August 2012, ISBN 978 1 4088 0243 4

Preliminary sketches for the great canvas of the Cold War were already under way in the Balkans in the summer of 1944 when Frank Thompson was executed. Bulgaria was a member of the Axis and Frank, older brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, was on a mission in the country for Special Operations Executive: the idea was that anti-Nazi partisans should be encouraged and supported in their efforts to stir up trouble, as their neighbours the Yugoslav partisans were doing, and keep German units too busy to deploy elsewhere. Frank was 23 when he fell into the hands of government forces. He had been parachuted into eastern Serbia six months earlier to link up with a band of Bulgarian fighters and accompany them across the border: it was a life of hiding, running and holing up in a hinterland far from the world of his fellow army officers.

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[*] E.P. Thompson introduced his father’s memories of Tagore in the LRB of 22 May 1986. Basil Davidson wrote about SOE in the issue dated 22 August 1996. Arnold Rattenbury reviewed Beyond the Frontier in the LRB, 8 May 1997.

[†] Jean McNicol wrote about Julian Bell in the LRB of 24 January.

Vol. 35 No. 5 · 7 March 2013 » » A Kind of Greek
pages 11-14 | 5103 words