Last Action Hero of the British Empire

In 1949, at the beginning of the Cold War, Lieutenant-Commander John Kerans, stuck in a desk job in Nanking, was suddenly called upon by the Admiralty to go to the rescue of a naval frigate, the HMS Amethyst, which had been caught in the crossfire of the Chinese civil war. In this thrilling account of the “Yangtse Incident,” Nigel Farndale captures all the excitement that surrounded Kerans’s unexpected hour of glory, and all the poignancy of his inevitable fall from grace.