Our Vanishing Heritage by Marcus Binney

Marcus Binney is an accomplished historian and writer who is the author of Our Vanishing Heritage, Townhouses, and Airports. Binney attended Cambridge, and has lectured extensively to historical societies in New York, Boston, Rhode Island, and Virginia on architectural preservation and history. He has also fronted a thirty-nine-part series -- Mansions: The Great Houses of Europe -- broadcast in the U.S. between 1993 and 1997.

Binney's interest in the lives of the agents of the SOE is a personal one. His father, Lt. Col. Francis Simms, MC, walked seven hundred miles through the Apennines after twice escaping from POW camps. His mother, Sonia, did secret work with code breakers during the war and in 1955 remarried Sir George Binney, DSO, also a war hero, who had carried out one of the most successful blockade-running operations of World War II in 1941 -- bringing back five unarmed merchant ships from Sweden through the minefields.