Interestingly, Mortimer suggests Fraser was omitted because he was “gay and a constant reminder to Stirling of his own great secret”. Herein lies the secret to Stirling’s success: an ability to bend more talented people than himself to his will. Believing that taking his idea up the chain of command was unlikely to work, Stirling decided to go straight to the top. He described this in detail in an interview from 1974, part of which is featured in Adam Curtis's documentary The Mayfair Set, episode 1: "Who Pays Wins". Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).

As a young lieutenant in 1941, David Stirling won a battle against military bureaucracy - he was able, against all odds, to introduce a new concept in fighting. His biggest success was on the night of 26–27 July 1942 when his SAS squadron, armed with 18 jeeps, raided the Sidi Haneish landing strip and destroyed 37 Axis aircraft (mostly bombers and heavy transport) for the loss of two men killed. In 1984, when Stirling gave the address at the opening of the new SAS base in Hereford — predictably named Stirling Lines — he repeated many of the myths and failed to mention either his brother or another early pioneer, Bill Fraser. Unbeknown to Stirling, Richards was an Anglo-Swiss stool pigeon, Theodore Schurch, who had deserted from the British army and was working for fascist intelligence. Finding it difficult to lead from the rear, Stirling often led from the front, his SAS units driving through enemy airfields in the Jeeps to shoot up aircraft and crew.In this gripping and controversial biography Gavin Mortimer analyses Stirling's complex character: the childhood speech impediment that shaped his formative years, the pressure from his overbearing mother, his fraught relationship with his brother, Bill, and the jealousy and inferiority he felt in the presence of his SAS second-in-command, the cold-blooded killer Paddy Mayne. Yet as Mortimer dazzlingly shows, while Stirling was instrumental in selling the SAS to Churchill and senior officers, it was Mayne who really carried the regiment in the early days.

Founded in 1949, while much of Africa was still under colonial rule, it had its high point at the 1956 Salima Conference. Gavin's other interest is sport and one of his books is The Great Swim, the story of the race to be the first woman to swim the English Channel. For Gavin Mortimer, on the other hand, both the capture and loose talk were typical of a man who was “imaginative, immature, immoderate and ill-disciplined”. Born into privilege – his paternal grandfather was a baronet and his mother was a daughter of the 13th Lord Lovat – Stirling followed the usual life of his caste, packed off to board at Ampleforth at a young age. But as I continued writing, I began to have increasing doubts; I went back to the interviews I had conducted, revisited archives and examined reams of documents; and as a result I discovered another David Stirling, the one described by senior officers in documents I unearthed as: ''insubordinate", "extravagantly careless", "impetuous", "wildly indiscreet" and "unreliable".His biographer Alan Hoe disputed the newspaper's disparaging portrayal of Stirling as a right-wing ' Colonel Blimp'. Under his leadership, the SAS carried out hit-and-run raids behind the Axis lines of the North African campaign. He founded the Capricorn Africa Society, which aimed to fight racial discrimination in Africa, but Stirling's preference to a limited, elitist voting franchise over universal suffrage limited the movement's appeal. He got involved in various shady schemes in Africa and other places, often involving former, and sometimes serving, SAS operators, including one to depose the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. By bidding on, or purchasing this item, you are agreeing to us sharing your name and address details with that 3rd party supplier to allow us to fulfil our contractual obligations to you.

A poor condition book can still make a good reading copy but is generally not collectible unless the item is very scarce. But was he really a military genius or in fact a shameless self-publicist who manipulated people, and the truth, for this own ends? Here, Mortimer rehabilitates Mayne, painting a more rounded picture of a ‘brilliant operational brain’, a born leader, and a fearless, but never pointlessly reckless, warrior. Woodhouse resigned as Director of Operations after a series of disagreements and Stirling ceased to take an active part in 1972.Sir Archibald David Stirling DSO OBE (15 November 1915 – 4 November 1990) was a British officer in the British Army and the founder and creator of the Special Air Service (SAS). He recruited like-minded individuals from within the trade union movement, with the express intention that they should cause as much trouble during conferences as permissible.

As a freelance journalist he has contributed articles to a diverse range of magazines and newspapers, including the Observer, the Guardian, History Monthly and Esquire.His father had land, money and status, but when he died in 1932 they passed to his brother Bill, the firstborn of his six children. In September 1967 Len Deighton wrote an article in The Sunday Times Magazine about Operation Snowdrop, a raid led by Stirling.