Young guns

The Spitfire -ids by Alasdair Cross (Headline, 368 pages, £20) Offering a welcome corrective to big-budget films that frequently cast actors in their thirties as Spitfire pilots, one of the key themes of this account is just how young some were – as were their counterparts who designed and built the aircraft. Based on last year’s BBC World

Service podcast Spitfire: The People’s Plane, this is a lively look at an innovation that changed the course of the Second World War.