In an interview on Burma

Tell me about your first choice, Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser.

The first line of the book is: ‘The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry riverbed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila. I can no more describe the smell than I could describe a colour, but it was heavy and pungent and compounded of stale cooked rice and sweat and human waste and … Jap.’ And this takes you straight back to his time during the Second World War in Burma. To me it is really visceral and effective in the way it describes what life was like then and what life was like for a private in the army. It is a very ground-level view of what it was like. For that reason it is a really exciting read.

What is great is that it is firsthand commentary. These are George MacDonald Fraser’s memoirs – the man who wrote the Flashman books. At the time Burma was still under the British colonial administration but the Japanese had controlled Burma for parts of the war and the British were fighting to regain control.

It sounds very evocative. As someone who has spent so much time in Burma, do you think some of the descriptions still ring true?

Yes, Burma is one of these places where it has been locked off from the rest of the world for so long that all these descriptions of an older time still hold true today. You can read a book like this and travel through Burma and still see the same scenes.