Thank God for McNally Editions, the publishing arm of McNally Jackson Books in New York that brings back life to forgotten gems dressed smartly in attractive covers and with freshly written introductions. This month’s offering is a comic masterpiece by Wilfrid Sheed, first published in 1966, about life at an obscure opinion-and-arts magazine called The Outsider. Any resemblance to, say, The Nation or The New Republic is pure coincidence. Our hero is George Wren, a junior editor who has been swooning over the publication since college and now gets to work for its editor in chief, Gilbert Twining, “the kind of Englishman who ought to be out posing for argyle socks.” Does Twining drink too much? Is he a tad lecherous and a tad more paranoid? And does Wren become his reluctant confidant? And is the magazine filled with staffers of varying degrees of talent and peccadilloes? No spoilers here, but if you yearn for the mythical days when magazine staffers had their own offices, went to long lunches, and whose work mattered more in their minds than anywhere else, then rush out of your open-floor-plan work life, skip the takeout at Sweetgreen, and buy Office Politics.
On the morning of Wednesday, April 30, 1980, a half-dozen heavily armed men seized the Iranian Embassy in London. Their goal was to persuade Britain to side with them in their fight against the Ayatollah Khomeini, who now ruled Tehran following the ouster of the Shah. Days of tension followed, and only after the terrorists executed an embassy employee and dumped his body on the front steps did the S.A.S., the country’s elite strike team, conduct a dramatic 17-minute raid that killed five of the terrorists and saved all but one of the remaining hostages. Ben Macintyre, best known for his superb best-sellers about World War II and Cold War espionage, applies his gift for narrative and eye for detail to full effect here, with a thrilling story of ordinary men and women suddenly thrust into extraordinary danger.
