Churchill's Iceman : The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke : Genius, Fugitive, Spy
by Hemming, Henry
Published by : Arrow Books (London) Physical details: xi,548 Pages 13x20 cm | PB ISBN:9780099594130. Year: 2015| Item type | Current location | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Books
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General Stacks | Non-fiction | 941.082092 H487C 2015 (Browse shelf) | Available | 32695 |
The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke : Genius, Fugitive, Spy.
Include Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography and Index.
There is no reason why you should have heard of Geoffrey Pyke. After his suicide in 1948 he was described as one of the great geniuses of his time, to rank alongside Einstein, yet he remains today, as The Times put it, ‘one of the most original if unrecognised figures’ of the twentieth century.
Inventor, escapee, campaigner, war correspondent, Pyke was an unlikely hero of both world wars and is seen today as the father of the U.S. Special Forces. He changed the landscape of British pre-school education, earned a fortune on the stock market, wrote a bestseller and in 1942 convinced Churchill and Lord Mountbatten to build an aircraft carrier out of reinforced ice. He gave birth to the Mass Observation movement, escaped from a German concentration camp, devised an ingenious plan to get ambulances and microscopes to the Spanish Republicans for free and launched a private attempt to avert the outbreak of the Second World War by sending into Nazi Germany a group of pollsters disguised as golfers. But there was another side to this man. Pyke, it seems, was a man with a secret.
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