It’s well known that even the dullest and dustiest desk-bound male lawyer has the occasional Walter Mitty fantasy. Here’s a perfect Christmas present for him, from the pen of media lawyer Roger Field.

Rogue Male (Coronet) is the true wartime memoir of Geoffrey Gordon-Creed DSO, MC, tank commander in the western desert, special operations executive saboteur behind German lines in Greece, and intelligence agent in the Middle East and liberated Europe. When he wasn’t blowing up bridges or cutting enemy throats, ‘Mister Major Geoff’ was occupied with the opposite sex, with apparently remarkable success.

It will come as no surprise that Gordon-Creed, who died in 2002, got to know James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming in the 1950s.

As an ex-soldier himself, Field reveals some empathy with his subject. But he’s also a libel lawyer - and says he has changed certain details in the book: ‘I have no wish to find myself facing a furious 90-year-old Greek matriarch claiming that her family now believe that she was one of Geoff’s many conquests.’