Overview

The extraordinary untold story of an enigmatic genius who changed warfare forever From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller, M- Maxwell Knight, MI5's Greatest Spymaster In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds. An inventor, adventurer and polymath, he was an unlikely hero of both world wars. He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, and is seen as the father of the U.S. Special Forces. In 1942, he convinced Winston Churchill to build an aircraft carrier out of reinforced ice. He escaped from a German WWI prison camp, wrote a bestseller, and aided Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He even launched a private attempt to avert the outbreak of the Second World War by sending into Nazi Germany a group of pollsters disguised as golfers. And he may have been a Russian spy. 70 years after his death, Henry Hemming reveals Pyke's astonishing story in full- his brilliance, his flaws, and his life of adventures, ideas, and secrets.

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9780099594130

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Reviews

The papers that MI5 released in 2009 have led to the discovery of a wonderful new subject for modern biography. Geoffrey Pyke was a tragic and lonely genius who attempted to plant new ideas into the unresponsive soil of Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. His final wish to be forgotten as if I had never lived has now been dramatically eclipsed by this amazing story of mystery and adventure. It is as if he had been invented by G. K. Chesterton and given posthumous fame by John le Carre - which underlines the extraordinary accomplishment of his actual biographer Henry Hemming. -- Michael Holroyd

Author Information

Henry Hemming is the author of five works of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times bestseller M, the Dolman Travel Award-shortlisted Misadventure in the Middle East and Churchill's Iceman, a New York Times bestseller. He has written for the Economist, The Sunday Times, FT Magazine and the Washington Post, among many others. He lives in London with his two children.

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