Notes

On 16 January 1991 Patrick Bishop looked up from his tent in the Northern Saudi desert to see warplanes moving like black daggers across the sky towards Iraq. After more than five months of waiting, the battle had finally begun. Bishop, the Daily Telegraph's Middle East Correspondent, travelled throughout the region during the crisis. * Famous Victory - the title is ironical - is a vivid, incisive, entertaining and personal account of a conflict that began as a smash and grab raid masquerading as the righting of a historical wrong, and ended as fudge presented as a moral victory. It takes us from the suburban kingdom of Jordan to the oppressiveness of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad. It describes life in the desert with the macho fantasists of the CS Marines and the secretive and cynical Saudi Arabians. Finally, it provides first-hand reportage of the war and the liberation of Kuwait, when Bishop returned at the head of a column of Kuwaiti tanks.