Five books a writer and ex-army officer couldn’t live without: Nigel Collett’s must-reads for a desert island
Books helped British Army officer Collett through some of the most trying times of the cold war, inspired him to be open about his sexuality, and now form the basis of his career. Here are the novels that have stuck with him
Nigel Collett is an author and a former lieutenant colonel in the British Army. He served with the Western Frontier Regiment in Oman in 1981 and 82 before spending a year as an instructor with the British Military Advisory Team in Zimbabwe. In 1984, he was transferred to the 6th Queen Elizabeth’s Own Gurkha Rifles and was posted to Hong Kong, where he served from 1985 to 1992.
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Since 1994 he has been managing director of employment services Gurkha International Manpower Services and Gurkha International (Hong Kong). He is the author of The Butcher of Amritsar (2005) and A Death in Hong Kong: The MacLennan Case of 1980 and the Suppression of a Scandal (2018).
Here are the five books he would take to a desert island, in his own words.
Other Men’s Flowers
by Archibald Wavell, 1944
I came across this anthology of poetry in 1988 when I was serving in the British army in Hong Kong. It was published in 1944 when Wavell was serving as commander in chief in India. The collection is everything he could remember of the famous English poets. It’s a popular book of poetry, but more than that, it offered a great boost to soldiers’ morale. That’s what really appealed to me. Wavell produced the book at one of the blackest times in his life, an ode to everything he loved about England.
