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Alfred Duff Cooper was a statesman, diplomat and author. Born in 1890, he won the DSO as a second lieutenant in the First World War, and entered Parliament in 1923. His life was devoted to politics until 1938 when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he resigned in protest at the Munich Agreement. Called back to office by Churchill in 1940, his wartime career culminated in his appointment as ambassador to France. Shortly before his death he was made 1st Viscount Norwich. Among his best-known books are Talleryrand, Operation Heartbreak and his autobiography, Old Men Forget. He died in 1954.
Operation Heartbreak pulls off the trick of revealing the fascinating hidden workings of the British War Office within a supremely moving and well-wrought tale... Its ending is as unexpected as it is affecting * Wall Street Journal * [A work of] jewel-like brevity and intensity * New York Herald Tribune * A first novel of great distinction . . . a delightful tragi-comedy of military manners. It has been constructed by Duff Cooper with a truly dramatic economy and told with humour, deep feeling and considerable skill * Daily Telegraph * It is the novel I enjoyed more than any other in the immediate post-war years, and one I have read many times since with undiminished pleasure and growing admiration for Duff Cooper's skill. It is a story of why men go to war, it is also a heart-wrenching love story; a wonderful novel by a masterly writer that should be on everyone's bookshelf -- Nina Bawden As creditable, as surprising, as abundantly and elegantly good, as anything else Duff Cooper turned his mind and hand to -- Michael Hofmann
