After co-authoring four books with the Sunday Telegraph's Christopher Booker, Dr Richard North - the defence analyst behind the Defence of the Realm blog - has written a blow-by-blow account of Britain's disastrous occupation of southern Iraq, from the April 2003 invasion to the withdrawal of all combat troops earlier this year.

As "the central symbol of the British Army's tragic and culpable ill-preparedness and lack of flexibility in dealing with the Iraq insurgency", North returns again and again to the controversial role played by the Snatch Land Rover in what Booker, writing in the foreword, argues was "one of the most humiliating chapters in the history of the British Army".