Macintyre pulls together countless strands better than anybody hitherto, with an enthusiasm that prompts the reader to leap from page to page … I have seldom enjoyed a spy story more than this one, and fiction will make dreary reading hereafter

Ben Macintyre has excelled himself … an utterly gripping story. One can finish the book with the strangely proud sensation that in the Second World War perfidious Albion played the Great Game remarkably well

If you thought Antony Beevor’s D-Day couldn’t be bettered: [here is] the amazing story of the madcap spy network that bamboozled the Germans in the build-up to invasion

Enjoyable and engrossing … For all its splendidly weird ploys and feints, Macintyre’s book culminates in a stirring account of old-fashioned courage

Immensely satisfying … Times columnist Macintyre has done his homework thoroughly and sketches out the characters of the double agents and their spymasters with sympathy and not a little humour … in its own way it is as true a portrait of the war as Beevor’s epic

Enthralling … Macintyre is a master at leading the reader down some very tortuous paths while ensuring they never lose their bearings … a book so gripping that I even found myself reading it in lifts

Exquisite entertainment

***** Crammed with anecdotes that will leave you laughing in disbelief … an astonishing story of Britain’s fake Nazi spies

Highly entertaining … Macintyre is a first-class narrative historian and Double Cross is as pacy as a thriller and better written than most

***** Fascinating

A meticulous, thrilling account of the double bluff that paved the way for D-Day … unfettered in the pages of history that read like the best adventure fiction, he becomes positively exuberant … utterly gripping

**** Grippingly enjoyable

**** No one does cloak-and-gun history better; Macintyre mixes a professor’s research with a journalist’s eye for a good story and a forensic scientist’s ability to spot the absurdities of war

Entertaining