S.O.E.

SOE, the Special Operations Executive, was a small, tough British secret service, a dirty tricks department established in July 1940 and encouraged by Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze'. This book focuses on the heroism of individual SOE agents across the world and provides us with a spellbinding account of the Executive's crucial wartime work.

M.R.D. FOOT was an army officer throughout the 1939-45 war, and received the French Croix de Guerre for work with the SAS in Britanny. He taught politics and history at Oxford, was for six years Professor of Modern History at Manchester and the first editor of Gladstone's diaries, and has written -- among other books -- SOE in France, Resistance, M19 and Six Faces of Courage. He helped Ian Dear edit The Oxford Companion to the Second World War. He died in 2012.

DAVID STAFFORD is the author of several books on intelligence history, including Britain and European Resistance, Churchill and Secret Service, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets, Flight from Reality and Ten Days to D-Day. He was Professor of History at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Executive Director of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, Chairman of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies, an Associate Member of St. Antony's College, Oxford, and Project Director at the Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh, where he is currently an Honorary Fellow.