Library Information - Reading: Spies

When the Second World War began Britain was unwilling to unleash its bombers for fear of provoking German attacks on British cities, but as defeat in continental Europe loomed in May 1940, it turned to bombing as the only means to strike back at Germany. Strategic bombing by Britain, and later the United States, then continued without respite for the rest of the war.

The Royal Air Force's (RAF) bombing offensive against Nazi Germany was one of the longest, most expensive and controversial of the Allied campaigns during the Second World War. Its aim was to severely weaken Germany's ability to fight, which was central to the Allies' strategy for winning the war.

RAF Bomber Command was created in 1936 and comprised the RAF's light and heavy bomber squadrons. Over the course of the war, it developed from a limited and relatively ineffective force into a weapon of immense destructive power. It received a major slice of Britain's economic and technological resources, and many of its brightest and best young men.

Playwright, novelist and translator Michael Frayn was born in London on 8 September 1933.
After two years National Service, during which he learned Russian, he read Philosophy at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He then worked as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian and The Observer, publishing several novels including The Tin Men (1965), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, The Russian Interpreter (1966), which won the Hawthornden Prize, and Towards the End of the Morning (1967). More recent novels include A Landing on the Sun (1991), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year; Headlong (1999), the story of the discovery of a lost painting by Bruegel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; and Spies (2002), a story of childhood set in England during the Second World War. Spies which won the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region, Best Book), and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year.