He can speak the language of soldiers, and has met all the surviving 'Originals' of 'L' Detachment (SAS). All the falsehoods and fabrications would have been harmless enough had Stirling not stolen the valour of his comrades.

By the end of 1954 it was struggling financially and required the generosity of his brother Bill to keep it afloat. Drawing on interviews with SAS veterans who fought with Stirling and men who worked with him on his post-war projects, and examining recently declassified governments files about Stirling's involvement in Aden, Libya and GB75, Mortimer's riveting biography is incisive, bold, honest and written with his customary narrative panache.You can sympathise with why David Stirling so assiduously took most of the credit for the creation of the SAS for himself.

He joined the Scots Guards and then the Commandos, but was a conspicuous failure at both as he displayed his idleness and irresponsibility (his nickname was the “Giant Sloth”). Stirling was released from captivity in April 1945 and on arriving in Britain he radioed a message to the SAS, then fighting in Germany, saying that he was back and raring to go: "Hope to come out and visit you soon. One of the first veterans I interviewed was Johnny Cooper, who served 18 years in the Regiment between 1941 and 1959.Along with several associates, Stirling formed Watchguard International Ltd, initially with offices in Sloane Street (where the Chelsea Hotel later opened), latterly in South Audley Street in Mayfair. His elder brother Bill, on the other hand, had founded the original Commando training centre at Lochailort and joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), set up by Churchill to coordinate resistance in occupied Europe. They hid by day and struck by night, destroying aircraft, blowing up ammunition dumps, derailing trains and killing many times their own number. They operated deep behind the German lines, driving hundreds of miles through the deserts of North Africa. David and Bill Stirling created the idea for a parachute unit to operate in the desert, attacking enemy airfields and coastal installations.

As well as appearing on numerous TV and radio programmes, Gavin has acted as a consultant to a number of documentaries including the BBC three-part series about the wartime SAS. On crutches following a parachuting accident, he stealthily entered Middle East headquarters in Cairo (under, through, or over a fence) in an effort to see Commander-in-Chief, Middle East Command General Sir Claude Auchinleck. Consequently, the society's attempt to deal with the problem of different levels of social development in a non-racial way was ineffective, although it received surprising validation when the South African Communist Party used Stirling's multi-racial elitist model for its 1955 "Congress Alliance" with the African National Congress of South Africa. He founded the Capricorn Africa Society, which aimed to fight racial discrimination in Africa, but Stirling's preference to a limited, elitist voting franchise over universal suffrage limited the movement's appeal.In January 1943 Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling, founder of the SAS, was flown to Rome for interrogation.

The histories we were all exposed to in the years after WW2 were almost all written by members of this class who thought there was nothing wrong with their god-given right to command, irrespective of actual ability. If you intend to prove that the thread that runs through David Stirling's 'life and times' and illuminates them is that he dishonestly presented himself and/or had been dishonestly represented, you're going to need bring a sack full of solid evidence. He also attempted to organise efforts to undermine trades unionism and to overthrow the British government, none of which made significant headway. Then in December 1955, Stirling heard that Mayne had been killed in a car crash; at last, the chance he'd been waiting for. The first operation of the new SAS was to steal from a nearby well-equipped New Zealand regiment various supplies including tents, bedding, tables, chairs and a piano.After the war, Stirling never achieved any real success, other than building his own myth once Mayne was safely out of the way. Following Mayne’s untimely death in a car crash in 1955, Stirling once again used his powers of self-promotion to create his own myth, appropriating many of Mayne’s qualities and successes along the way.