Shadowplay: A Memoir From Behind the Lines and Under Fire: The Inside Story of Europe's Last War

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When getting into that diplomatic territory, Marshall begins to quote a lot of unnamed inside sources, which may be unavoidable- but in fact he barely provides any sources at all, with a feeble bibliography. Another of his digressions from his own experience is his coverage of the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’, and though one can’t fault him for discussing the event despite his absence, he seems to draw everything all from one source. After three years as IRN’s Paris correspondent and extensive work for BBC radio and TV, Tim joined Sky News. Reporting from Europe, the USA and Asia, Tim became Middle East Correspondent based in Jerusalem. Look again at the standard Mercator map and you see that Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, and yet Africa is actually fourteen times the size of Greenland! You could fit the USA, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe. We know Africa is a massive land mass, but the maps rarely tell us how massive.”

Shadowplay : Behind the Lines and Under Fire: The Inside

A gripping eyewitness account of a major 20th-century military conflict by the UK's most popular writer on geopolitics. The shattering of Yugoslavia in the 1990s showed that, after nearly 50 years of peace, war could return to Europe. It came to its bloody conclusion in Kosovo in 1999. The author, Tim Marshall, was a reporter for Sky News. He tells us that this book was first published in 2002 but in Serbo-Croat but now it has been translated. An engaging and very vivid account of the Kosovo War. In this book Tim Marshall gives a full account of his time as a war correspondent for Sky News in late 1990's Yugoslavia. It is Oct-1998 and the Kosovo War is in full swing. I was really looking forward to the boots on the ground war reporting, but that was not really the case, and this was not really that kind of war. It was not like he could embed himself in a platoon of British soldiers on the ground as there were none.His other books include Worth Dying For – The Power & Politics Of Flags, Divided – Why We Are Living In An Age Of Walls, and The Power of Geography – Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of our World. The cover, showing all Yugoslavia, suggests that the book will examine a lot more than just Kosovo- in practice it’s focused on the author’s experience in Kosovo, though he was also present in the Bosnian war. Even still, it’s focus is narrow; Marshall was based in Serbia proper for most of this time and so the book covers only this perspective, focusing more on NATO bombings of Serbia and discussing remarkably little about events in Kosovo. In fact individual Kosovo Albanians are only mentioned four times total in the entire book; if you’re looking to learn anything about Kosovo beyond the very basics you won’t find it here. The book provides the reader with exclusive "behind the scenes" coverage of diplomatic games, psychological warfare and military operations in combination with showing the human side of war, mainly in the objective descriptions of suffering on the Serbian, as well as the Kosovar Albanian side.

Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire: The Inside…

A somewhat cheeky republished book (originally written in 2002), no doubt to capitalise on Marshall's success with his recent geo-political work. It is however a decent read. Tim Marshall, then diplomatic editor at Sky News, was on the ground covering the Kosovo War. This is his illuminating account of how events unfolded, a thrilling journalistic memoir drawing on personal experience, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with intelligence officials from five countries.Style & engagement: (4/5)
Marshall has a casual writing style that I thoroughly enjoyed, although it seemed callous at moments, especially when writing about the devastating losses experienced in the war. However, with that casual writing style came a matter-of-fact, unvarnished description of the events and politics that shaped this conflict. Often histories written by journalists have such a stuffy air to them that they get extremely dry, and Marshall breaks that pattern with this book. I ultimately found his style engaging and interesting—even useful. Writing style is definitely a plus of this book. It feels like you have been dropped into the middle of the book rather than at the beginning. A lot of information and names are thrown at you without any context or summation of what is going on and why we are where we are. From the British strategy to NATO to the Serbs to the KLA it all feels a bit of complex mess. Hang in there. I made a list of names and positions as I went. Essentially the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) ‘intend to liberate Kosovo from Serbian rule’. They want independence. They see the Serbs as the oppressor. Tim also draws from his insights into international relations to predict future affairs and crises, and his work increasingly comments on the intersection of technological advances with political developments. His upcoming book Space explores the geopolitics of space. He highlights that with sky satellites maintaining the world’s economy; space metals being worth more than most countries’ GDP; and people expected on Mars in the next decade, space will increasingly dominate military thinking. The leading superpowers of Russia, America, and China all have space commands and are developing warfighting capabilities for space.