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The astonishing story of how in Egypt, 1942, Colonel Dudley Clarke's ingenious, eccentric A Force thwarted the Nazis and invented a whole new playbook of military deception Cairo, 1942: If you had asked a British officer who Colonel Clarke was, they would have been able to point him out: always ready with a drink and a story, he was a well-known figure in the local bars. If you then asked what he did, you would have less success. Those who knew didn't tell, and almost no one really knew at all.

Clarke thought of himself as developing a new kind of weapon. Its components? Rumour, stagecraft, a sense of fun. Its target? The mind of Erwin Rommel, Hitler's greatest general. Throughout history, military commanders have sought to mislead their opponents. Dudley Clarke set out to do it on a scale no one had imagined before. Even afterwards, almost no one understood the magnitude of his achievement.

Drawing on recently released documents and hugely expanding on the louche portrait of Clarke as seen in SAS: Rogue Heroes, journalist and historian Robert Hutton reveals the amazing story of Clarke's A Force, the invention of the SAS and the Commandos, and the masterful hoodwinking of the Desert Fox at the battle of El Alamein. The Illusionist tells for the first time the dazzling tale of how, at a pivotal moment in the war, British eccentricity and imagination combined to thwart the Nazis and save innumerable lives - on both sides. A cracking tale. With admiration and pacy prose, Robert Hutton tracks one of the great British characters of WW2. Expect ingenuity and eccentricity by the barrow-load

Warfare has been partly about deception since the days of the Trojan Horse, but by the time of the Second World War it appeared to have reached a peak of sophistication. And, according to Robert Hutton in this well-researched and often entertaining book, the ultimate sophisticate was Dudley Clarke - Telegraph

Riveting. Truly revelatory. Jaw-dropping. Stranger than any fiction, you simply could not make these stories up. At last, Dudley Clarke and his extraordinary war as it deserved to be told. The master of lies, trickery and deception uncovered. Huzzah! Great fun and wonderfully written - author of SAS: Forged In Hell

Cuts through the myths to give us the real person behind Montgomery's deception campaigns that won WW2 in the desert and Western Europe. I was hooked from page one . . . a stirring tale well told - author of 1945: Victory in the West

Page-turning and utterly compelling . . . superb

Hutton has revealed the brilliance of the 'master of deception', Dudley Clarke. It took a true creative eccentric like Clarke to become the brains behind the success of the SAS and commandos in North Africa. Meticulously researched, The Illusionist is simply superb

This story is as crazy as it is compelling, and Robert Hutton tells it brilliantly. Dudley Clarke's wartime activities were so outlandish as to be scarcely believable, and Hutton's achievement is meticulously to sift fact from rumour and myth. He does this without losing the gripping drama and striking humanity of this remarkable, important and hitherto overlooked tale - former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, GCHQ

An excellent analysis - Literary Review Robert Hutton spent 16 years covering the British government for Bloomberg and is now sketchwriter for The Critic. He is the author of several books, most recently Agent Jack: The True Story of MI5's Secret Nazi Hunter (2019). The astonishing story of how in Egypt, 1942, Colonel Dudley Clarke's ingenious, eccentric A Force thwarted the Nazis and invented a whole new playbook of military deception