Biographies, new and noted

Brenda Maddox doesn't much like Sarah Helm's A Life in Secrets: The story of Vera Atkins and the lost agents of SOE, which is too bad. According to this NYT obit, Atkins was the inspiration for Miss Moneypenney of James Bond fame. As a member of the Special Operations Executive, Atkins recruited and trained agents who were sent to France to sabotage Nazi operations.

The end of the war only increased Atkins’s responsibilities. Hundreds of secret agents had not returned, among them many of the women she called her “girls”. Although the SOE was closed down in 1946, she was determined to find out as far as possible what had happened to every one of her missing agents. Her records were meticulous: seventeen index cards said “Believed executed at Buchenwald”. She clung to hope for any whose fate was unknown. Each returnee was shown photographs of the missing SOE women.

The saddest story is of the tiny, gentle Anglo-Indian Nora Inayat Kahn, code-named “Madeleine” for her ability to pass as French. Nora was given a particularly dangerous mission: to be the first woman wireless operator to be sent by SOE to France, with the dangerous and easily detectable task of sending and receiving messages about planned sabotage operations. But messages from Nora became ambiguous, then stopped, and by D-Day in June 1944, she was considered missing. In time, it was learned that she had nearly escaped from the prison in Paris where she was held only to be removed to a German prison, where she was kept in chains. Not until well after the war ended, did Atkins finally discover that Nora had died at Dachau.

William Hague's William Pitt the Younger gets a mostly favorable review by Max Boot.

Pitt showed such great ability that both king and Parliament were content to entrust the country to his care for year after year. He was a skilled, hard-working, and incorruptible financial manager, and so dedicated to the commonweal that he did not hesitate to fire his own brother as First Lord of the Admiralty for subpar performance. He was also a mild reformer, unsuccessfully pushing political rights for Roman Catholics, a reorganization of parliamentary seats to comport with population shifts, and an end to the slave trade. But after 1793 all such domestic concerns were subordinated by the demands of war against the French Revolution.

Like John Adams in the United States, Pitt did not hesitate to pass repressive legislation to quell the possibility of an uprising in his own country. Habeas corpus was suspended and large political meetings banned. Anyone who spoke favorably about the French Revolution in public was liable to be jailed. (And to think that some historical ignoramuses claim the Patriot Act is the height of repression!)

...

In combating French designs, Pitt made many risky and courageous decisions. In 1798, he sent the bulk of the Royal Navy to the Mediterranean in pursuit of a French expeditionary force, even though it left the home islands vulnerable to invasion. This gambit led directly to Horatio Nelson's victory in the Battle of the Nile, which destroyed a French fleet and left Napoleon's army stranded in Egypt. Pitt showed equal wisdom and resolution on many other occasions, whether dealing with King George III's intermittent bouts of madness or facing down the mutiny of the Channel Fleet in 1797.

His greatest achievement lay in the unglamorous realm of finance. By raising large sums of money through a combination of borrowing and taxing (Pitt introduced Britain's first income tax, capped at 10 percent), he was able to create the "sinews of war" that kept one anti-French coalition after another going until final victory at Waterloo.