David Downing

David Downing has kept two careers running at once. The Moscow Option, published in 1980, is a counterfactual history asking what would have followed had the German army taken Moscow in 1941, and it belongs with Downing's nonfiction on military and political history. The Dark Clouds Shining, from 2018, is fiction: the fourth and last book about Jack McColl, a former British Secret Service man who is pulled out of prison and sent to Soviet Russia in 1921, arriving as the civil war closes and the Kronstadt revolt is put down. Downing, born in 1946, grew up in Harrow and read Afro-Asian Studies and International Relations at Sussex. His best known work is the eight-novel John Russell sequence, each volume named for a railway station and most of them set in Berlin. A study of Neil Young, A Dreamer of Pictures, came in 1994. He has lived in Guildford with his wife Nancy since 1998.