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( SOE ) ( SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE ) FIELDING, Xan
NEAR FINE COPY OF THE ORIGINAL EDITION
Published: Secker & Warburg, 1954
Stock code: 29973
Price: £244.00
8vo., First Edition, with 15 plates on 8 and endpaper maps in red; red cloth, backstrip lettered in silver, a near fine copy.
With neat personal name stamp on front free endpaper. Arguably the scarcest of all the SOE personal memoirs. Fielding (1918-1991) was one of the first SOE agents (with Paddy Leigh Fermor and Dick Barnes) to be landed in Crete where he spent two years or so in a precarious game of hide and seek with the occupying Germans. Arrested in France later in the war, he was saved from execution by the Polish SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek. In post-war years a close friend of Lawrence Durrell, Fielding developed a career as writer and translator, achieving acclaim for his translation of 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'. EXTREMELY SCARCE. Enser, p.192.