Patrick Marnham
Views of War
Army of the Night
The Life and Death of Jean Moulin, Legend of the French Resistance
Published: 2000
Bloomsbury/Tauris Parke
‘It’s a fascinating book, a lovely evocation of the provincial France of my youth…. The betrayal of PROSPER is a horrible story and you tell it very well.’
Allan Massie
‘A gripping account of the last days of the Resistance hero tortured to death… A brilliant mix of political thriller and wartime history.’
J.G.Ballard, Evening Standard
‘There are moments of dazzling brilliance… It has the qualities of a poem or a film.’
Lara Feigel, Observer
‘Unpicks the complicated web of deceits and half-truths that surrounded much of her life with wit, patience and skill, providing just the sort of compelling read that Wesley did in her novels.’
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Who is
Patrick Marnham
Patrick Marnham (born 1943) is an English writer, journalist and biographer. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society Literature in 1988. He is primarily known for his travel writing and for his biographies, where he has covered subjects as diverse as Diego Rivera, Gorges Simenon, Jean Moulin and Mary Wesley.
His work has been translated into ten languages and he has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Prize, the Marsh Biography Award and was nominated for New York’s Edgar Allen Poe Award in 1994. In 1988 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Marnham’s writing has been praised by Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, Paul Theroux and PD James.
Doris Lessing wrote that Fantastic Invasion was “an exhilarating Swiftian excursion into human folly. A brilliant book”.
Norman Lewis said that So Far from God “remains one of my half-dozen travel favourites”, and Colin Wilson described it as “one of the most powerful pieces of political reporting I have ever read”.
Muriel Spark, reviewing The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret, wrote that “it adds to our understanding not only of Simenon’s art but the art of the novel itself”.
Antonia Fraser said that Wild Mary was “extraordinary, sexy and a very good read”.
Patrick Marnham started his career as a reporter on Private Eye and has contributed to many newspapers and magazines in the United Kingdom, France and America. He has worked as a BBC script writer and broadcaster and as a special correspondent in the Middle East and Central America. In 1977 he was commissioned by the Minority Rights Group to travel through West Africa to write a report on famine and drought. He wrote and narrated the screenplay for Manu Riche’s prize-winning film of Snake Dance which was released in 2013.
He has been literary editor of the Spectator and was the first Paris Correspondent of The Independent when he and his wife lived for twelve years in Paris. They now live in Oxfordshire.
His most recent book, published in September 2020, is War in the Shadows: Resistance, Deception and Betrayal in Occupied France, an investigation into the betrayal of a British resistance network in the summer of 1943.