ARNHEM By Antony Beevor (Viking £8.99, 560 pp)

ARNHEM

By Antony Beevor (Viking £8.99, 560 pp)

The British traditionally love a heroic military failure: Operation Market Garden, the failed attempt to create an Allied invasion route into northern Germany, was memorialised in the 1977 epic, A Bridge Too Far.

Antony Beevor’s best-selling account of the operation takes a steelier look both at the defeat and at the dreadful civilian suffering that ensued.

‘The failure of Operation Market Garden was bad for British morale,’ Beevor writes, ‘but for the Dutch the consequences affected the whole population, not just the 180,000 people forced from their homes.’

Ignoring warnings about the impossibility of deploying armoured vehicles on the low-lying polderland, Field Marshall Montgomery pushed ahead with his disastrous plan.

This finely detailed account of the human cost ends with a poignant anecdote of loss redeemed.

ARLOTT, SWANTON AND THE SOUL OF ENGLISH CRICKET By Stephen Fay and David Kynaston (Bloomsbury £10.99, 400 pp)

ARLOTT, SWANTON AND THE SOUL OF ENGLISH CRICKET 

By Stephen Fay and David Kynaston (Bloomsbury £10.99, 400 pp)

When the BBC lost the rights to broadcast England’s Test tours last year, the dismay was unconfined.

As the authors observe in their account of two beloved post-war cricket broadcasters, cricket and the BBC are intimately linked.

John Arlott with his Hampshire burr and E.W. Swanton’s patrician tones ‘transformed the broadcasting of the nation’s summer game into a national institution’.

Both men learned to love cricket as boys, but their backgrounds and temperaments were very different.

Yet if they were never quite friends, this engaging joint biography confirms that they were united by ‘a deep and thoughtful love of cricket and cricketers’.

LOVE IS BLIND By William Boyd (Penguin £8.99, 384 pp)

LOVE IS BLIND By William Boyd (Penguin £8.99, 384 pp)

LOVE IS BLIND 

By William Boyd (Penguin £8.99, 384 pp)

Of all the professional skills that might enable a young man to lead a life of adventure, piano tuning is perhaps not the first that comes to mind.

But this is the trade of Brodie Moncur, hero of Boyd’s latest novel. 

Brodie is the son of a fire-and-brimstone clergyman from the Scottish borders; his mother died when he was 14, worn out by child-bearing.

Of her ten surviving children, Brodie is the only one to escape the manse, first to Edinburgh and then to Paris. 

Here Brodie, a canny businessman as well as an expert piano tuner, comes to an agreement with an Irish piano virtuoso, to promote pianos.

It is an arrangement that will take Brodie to perilous places, both geographically and emotionally. Boyd’s elegant, intricately plotted novel contains some teasing conundrums for literary detectives.