Book reviewer COLIN STEELE looks at two books with the common theme of war, one a fictional thriller, the other a factual account of an English city’s wartime work.

Charles Beaumont is the pseudonym of a former British MI6 intelligence officer. 

His debut novel, A Spy Alone (2023), achieved critical and commercial success, with Beaumont’s main character, Simon Sharman, unmasking, at considerable personal danger, a Russian spy ring, originating in Oxford in the 1990s, and still operating in the present day.

Beaumont has said his second book, A Spy at War (Canelo, rrp $32.95), was written “about a year ago, but as the Ukraine situation evolves – including what I certainly regard as a betrayal of Ukraine by the United States and Donald Trump and his people… it’s something which I anticipated in the book to some extent”.

The novel begins in August 2022 with Sharman setting out to avenge the murder of his colleague Evie by a Chechen fighter in Prague, which takes him into war-torn Ukraine and ultimately the frontline and the special operations around Bakhmut.

Beaumont develops a parallel plot line in which elements of the Russian spy ring are still operating and propagating Russian disinformation to undermine Ukraine’s case both in Kyiv and London. Beaumont convincingly depicts the behind-the-scenes Westminster power battles, while delivering an indictment of Russian money and influence in London in recent decades.

A Spy At War, mixing geopolitical intrigue with personal betrayal and revenge, reaffirms Beaumont’s place in the current espionage fiction first division. The novel’s cliffhanger, ending on a British grouse shooting moor, foreshadows another book in the series.

IN World War II, Hitler allegedly told the Luftwaffe not to attack Oxford as he wanted it to be his capital after the defeat of Britain.

Ashley Jackson in his comprehensive and fascinating Oxford’s War 1939-1945 (Bodleian Library, rrp $59.95) notes the wide currency of this belief, but that it remains unsubstantiated.

Nonetheless, while Oxford didn’t become the British Dresden, 29 people were killed in bombing attacks on Cambridge.

Jackson, Professor of Imperial and Military History at King’s College London, definitively examines the impact of World War II on the city, the university, and its people, drawing on first-hand narratives and material from university and college archives.

Jackson sets the scene in 1939 of a very ”insular Oxford” just before World War II, before it became “an extension of Churchill’s wartime capital“. 

Oxford became an alternative base for civil servants from many ministries, as well as seeing military and intelligence staff housed in Oxford colleges.

The young women, working on counterintelligence in Keble College, boarded buses daily with the bus conductors booming out “Blenheim Palace for MI5”, which presumably contradicted the wartime “loose lips” slogan.

Apart from not being used to females in college, Keble’s bursar, a retired lieutenant colonel, accused the women of breaking more crockery than his male undergraduates. MI5 responded with incredulity. “Could its ladies really have broken 28 large coffee pots, 740 plates and 104 dishes in the dining room? Weren’t the servants to blame?”

Many Oxford academics worked in government departments and intelligence units, such as Bletchley Park, or enlisted, but a number who remained in Oxford made significant wartime contributions.

Australia’s Howard Florey and Dorothy Hodgkin worked on medicinal penicillin development. Two local Oxford people became penicillin’s first human guinea pigs at the Radcliffe infirmary.

Work on radar and nuclear fission took place in the Clarendon Laboratory while Christ Church College was the Oxford location of Churchill’s chief scientific adviser Sir Frederick Lindemann. William Beveridge was to lay the foundations of the post-war welfare state working from University College.

Those too old to join up, joined the Home Guard. The Oxford “Dad’s Army” included famous names, such as JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Tolkien became an ARP Warden, sitting by a telephone in a “cheerless concrete hut in the grounds of St Hughs”, while CS Lewis says that he spent one night in nine, “mooching about the most depressing and malodorous parts of Oxford with a rifle”.

Jackson has delivered a fascinating account of the role Oxford played in World War II. Jackson, after commenting on Hitler’s disregard for universities and their research contribution, has reflected: “It shows how democracies need university support in times of a national emergency”. A very relevant comment in the context of Donald Trump’s attacks on universities and research in 2025.

As usual with the Bodleian Library Publishing, this 408-page hardback book is beautifully produced with numerous full-colour and black and white illustrations and a stunning cover reproducing John Nash’s memorable 1942 painting of wartime Oxford.