Michael Asher (1) (1953–)

For me reading this book followed the same pattern as The Defence of the Realm, by Christopher Andrew: a nice fat non-fiction tome about British intelligence/military history that I tucked into with abandon at first but then had to stop reading as I found myself becoming almost uncomfortably overstuffed with information. But oh, what information! I loved the tales of derring-do, especially those of Paddy Mayne, he who ripped out aircraft instrument panels with his bare hands, blew up a show more railway line no fewer than seven times (then was told by HQ to stop as the British were now using the line), and did a parachute drop while wearing formal service dress and carrying a wind-up gramophone and records in his leg-bag. What a character. I also liked the way the story was told -- as a former SAS member, Asher speaks the jargon and uses it well. Of course, I may have an advantage in interpreting military jargon because I come across a lot of it at work, but I still think it's fairly accessible. Recommended for military history buffs. show less

A very readable history of the Mahdist period of Sudan, albeit written from the British point of view.

Asher knows Sudan and the Sudanese, as well as deserts, camels and the military, and is able to write with colour and insight.

He is very generous to those British officers whom he admires, but equally critical of the officer class in general. His warmest praise is reserved for the ordinary British soldiers - and their Sudanese and Egyptian allies under British officers and British show more training.

The beginning and end almost let the book down. I almost stopped reading it when I found 'screaming dervishes' on the second page. At the very end, perhaps in an attempt to make it relevant to today's post-9/11 world, he makes a couple of errors. Ja'afar Nimairi's regime was overthrown by intifada (popular uprising) in 1985, not by a coup in 1989. The 1989 coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi, so it is unlikely that he was 'the power behind the coup', as Asher claims. Asher also states that Osama bin Laden made his home in Sudan from 1994 to 1998. I am ready to be corrected, but I believe he arrived earlier than that and left in 1996. Small but significant errors.

And the maps... I have rarely found a book that gives maps in the detail which I would like, and which show every single place mentioned in the text. These maps are no exception.

Edited to add: Rereading it in 2018 I was much more charitable. I wrote:

I found it very readable, a good narrative style, pretty good on detail, good maps. A very competent account of the entire campaign from Sheikan to Omdurman, with some interesting background.

Asher does a good job of presenting both sides fairly sympathetically (and, when needed, fairly caustically). His own knowledge, experience and understanding of Sudan, its peoples, its geography, its deserts, the Arabic language, the Nile, stands him in good stead. For example, he goes into far more detail about the cultural background of groups such as the Baggara and Beja than most writers do, and this sheds light on their behaviour in battle. He rejects the catch-all phrase "religious fanatics", and examines the multiple reasons why people joined the Mahdist movement (some as simple as self-preservation or profit) and the non-religious reasons why certain groups were fanatical warriors. On this re-reading of the book I gained more insights from him into the British military tactics of the time. Apparently the greatest compliment you could give a British regiment was that they were "steady".

I was interested by his argument that in the camel-mounted troops who spearheaded the march across the Bayuda Desert from Korti to Metemma, "the special forces concept had been born. It would be another thirty-two years before T.E. Lawrence developed modern guerrilla warfare, and another sixty before the special forces idea would come into its own" (p 169). show less

My love for reading historical records from WWII is always tempered by this remark; "How the hell did we not end up speaking German?" and this book is yet another that reinforces just how bloody lucky we were. It was no small miracle that Hitler was by himself tactically stupid yet only just more stupid than those in power, collectively, in the UK...

This book brilliantly tells one of the lesser-known secret ops of WWII to capture, or kill the greatest General of the wart, Erwin Rommel, The show more Desert Fox. This one botched plan was also the birth of Special Forces, namely the Commandos, SAS and SBS and from inauspicious beginnings and typically English aristocracy it is a wonder that such revered fighting men ever came from it.

This book tells a great story covering desert warfare, tactical achievements and failures, bumbling chains of command and sincere character references making it a fascinating, frustrating and very easy read for anyone who is interested, or not interested in war. As much designed to tear down the aura of invincibility of the SAS as applaud it Asher is in no doubt who were the heroes and who were the idiots of the campaigns to the point of all but discrediting a posthumous Victoria Cross...touchy subject, but if the book is to be taken as gospel you would agree however this vein of cynicism does maintain a strong presence right through the book, whether rightly or wrongly it becomes a subjective matter.

The only crticism of the book I would mention is a lack of pictures that are relevant to the story. show less

I am perhaps a quarter of the way through Asher's biography of T. E. Lawrence, and am finding the his admittedly admiring and admittedly idiosyncratic picture of the man behind the myth a fascinating one. What emerges is a man broken by Victorian class, gender and psychosexual expectations. Asher is an open fan of Lawrence and his accomplishments who has spent the better part of his adult retracing Lawrence's exploits, in some ways even reliving them--e.g. cross the Sahara on show more camelback.

Lawrence's father it turns out was an Anglo-Irish nobleman who ran off with the family governess, leaving a wife (who refused to give him a divorce) and kids in Ireland. His mother was an illegitimate daughter of a destitute father, orphaned at a young age, and left to make her own way in the world. The two of them resettled with an assumed name at first in Wales, and then in Oxford, where Ned Lawrence, a second son, grew up.

Lawrence's mother was apparently something of a force to be reckoned with, and Ned spent most of his life constantly attempting to separate himself from her influence. Wracked by pangs of gender dysphoria, Lawrence developed a taste for wildly eccentric self-inflicted acts of depredation and pain that he took care to demonstrate exhibitionistically to a select audience. For example bathing in an ice covered river, eating only erratically.

A lot of this in Asher's analysis was a reaction to a sense of failed masculinity. He was smallish and refused to compete in sports of the day, particularly team sports, at school or at Oxford, which were practically required. He set himself apart, never had obvious (and admitted) homoerotic leanings, but apparently never acted on them in any "conventional" way. He did hire a manual laborer to flog him regularly (about which he invented the most ingenious of stories), from which he apparently, on occasion, achieved sexual release. Otherwise it appears as though he had no romantic relationships with men or women, though he had several enthusiastic friendships, usually either with matronly asexual women or younger men who were marked social inferiors.

Lawrence began actively making his own myth from an early age. For example, in order to get into the good graces of a well-connected curator who had asked him to collect some Hittite cylinders on one of his early trips to the Middle East, Lawrence apparently (though it is difficult to be sure, since his life is surrounded by such a matrix of half-truths) fabricated a story of being robbed and nearly beaten to death. He delivered the cylinders to his would-be patron without mentioning this, but then told the stories piece meal around Oxford in such a way that they were sure to get back to the courted don. Amazingly, it worked. Lawrence was able to draw on this pseudo debt to get an appointment as a paid assistant on an Anatolian archeological dig, in spite of the fact that the dig did not require another assistant and at the time Lawrence did not yet have the linguistic skills to be truly useful!

Many of Lawrence's exploits seem to have this sort of element about them. And yet his very ability to move as a de-classed individual through a society utterly dominated by class concerns, and his remarkable abilities at assimilation in foreign cultures--that is, to become fairly quickly accepted in them to a certain extent--was predicated on what he felt was his own inner emptiness, at home no where in the world. show less