Looking back on the life of his revolutionary comrade Che Guevara in his introduction to the Bolivian Diary, Fidel Castro claims that "rarely, if ever, in history has one man's image, name and example spread so rapidly and so completely". Ernesto Guevara de la Sema is the ultimate revolutionary, an icon who spawned a million T-shirts, and whose death in 1967 whilst fermenting revolution in Bolivia enshrined him as a martyr of the radical Left. In his short life Che Guevara led military revolutions in Mexico, the Congo and, most famously, Cuba, before heading to Bolivia in 1966 to establish a guerrilla movement in an attempt to overthrow the Bolivian military dictatorship. His Bolivian Diary, first published in Cuba in 1968, is the remarkable and ultimately tragic first-hand account of Che's formation of a tiny band of revolutionaries, his attempt to proselytise the local peasants, his skirmishes with the Bolivian army, and his final shootout and cold-blooded execution at the hands of the military in October 1967. Stripped of the romantic idealism usually associated with Che, the diary is a sobering account of the drudgery, fear and monotony of guerrilla warfare. Much of the diary is taken up with the preoccupations of basic survival in the primitive conditions of the Bolivian mountains, whilst playing a tense and often ineffective game of hit and run with the Bolivian army. There are some wonderful moments, such as Che breaking off from military preparations to remember that, "I must write some letters to Sartre and Bertrand Russell. " or commandeering a jeep and running it on the urine of his guerrillas. [+]

There may be worse titles for a biography of Lord Montgomery of Alamein than The Full Monty, but none readily come to mind. At best it suggests a few laughs that most certainly aren't to be found, and at worst a staggering insensitivity when the book's central thesis is Montgomery's confused and complex sexuality. Nigel Hamilton has already written an acclaimed three-volume biography of Monty, published in the 1980s, which reclaimed the honour and reputation of the British soldier that had been savaged by earlier generations of American historians, and now asks his readers to wade through 800 pages of what is only the first of two planned volumes of his reassessment. Inevitably, a great deal of the material is much the same-Hamilton is a scrupulous archivist-and the only critical difference is that this time round Monty's homosexuality takes central stage. Monty's sexuality wasn't exactly a secret among World War II historians when Hamilton began his research in the early 1980s, and he makes some special pleading for his reasons for having omitted it first time round. He was too young a biographer to enter "these dark waters", his father would have been aghast; homosexuality in the military wasn't tolerated in the 1980s: all these facts conspired the young Hamilton to largely conceal an important part of his subject's personality. There have been several biographies of Monty that have been published after Hamilton's magnum opus, all of which have openly dealt with his sexuality, so why, apart from an understandable desire-as Monty's official biographer-to put the record straight, would Hamilton want to rake over an old story? The answer appears to be that Hamilton is such a Montyphile that, having come to terms with his hero being outed, he wants to annexe his sexuality to his own ends. So rather than seeing Monty's homosexuality as just another facet of his personality, Hamilton seeks to make a virtue of it by claiming it was this that made him such a brilliant and charismatic general. Hamilton suggests that being gay was what made Monty so empathetic with his troops, which in turn inspired their loyalty; this is both specious and deluded sexual stereotyping. Is it not possible that Monty's success owes more to an astute military mind? Inevitably, perhaps Hamilton's fondness for his subject also blinds him to some unpalatable truths. [+]