Tim Marshall, then diplomatic editor at Sky News, was on the ground covering the Kosovo War. This is his illuminating account of how events unfolded, a thrilling journalistic memoir drawing on personal experience, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with intelligence officials from five countries.

Shadowplay: A Memoir From Behind the Lines and Under Fire

Went into this expecting to be captured by TM as I was with his prisoners/powers of geography books. It was not. Tim Marshall was Diplomatic Editor and foreign correspondent for Sky News. After thirty years’ experience in news reporting and presenting, he left full time news journalism to concentrate on writing and analysis. When getting into that diplomatic territory, Marshall begins to quote a lot of unnamed inside sources, which may be unavoidable- but in fact he barely provides any sources at all, with a feeble bibliography. Another of his digressions from his own experience is his coverage of the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’, and though one can’t fault him for discussing the event despite his absence, he seems to draw everything all from one source. An engaging and very vivid account of the Kosovo War. In this book Tim Marshall gives a full account of his time as a war correspondent for Sky News in late 1990's Yugoslavia. Tim also draws from his insights into international relations to predict future affairs and crises, and his work increasingly comments on the intersection of technological advances with political developments. His upcoming book Space explores the geopolitics of space. He highlights that with sky satellites maintaining the world’s economy; space metals being worth more than most countries’ GDP; and people expected on Mars in the next decade, space will increasingly dominate military thinking. The leading superpowers of Russia, America, and China all have space commands and are developing warfighting capabilities for space.A gripping eyewitness account of a major 20th-century military conflict by the UK's most popular writer on geopolitics. The shattering of Yugoslavia in the 1990s showed that, after nearly 50 years of peace, war could return to Europe. It came to its bloody conclusion in Kosovo in 1999.

Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire by Tim Marshall Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire by Tim Marshall

This book is a memoir of the author’s experience as a journalist in the Kosovo war, but it also tries to be a lot more and fails pretty badly. Style & engagement: (4/5)
Marshall has a casual writing style that I thoroughly enjoyed, although it seemed callous at moments, especially when writing about the devastating losses experienced in the war. However, with that casual writing style came a matter-of-fact, unvarnished description of the events and politics that shaped this conflict. Often histories written by journalists have such a stuffy air to them that they get extremely dry, and Marshall breaks that pattern with this book. I ultimately found his style engaging and interesting—even useful. Writing style is definitely a plus of this book. Look again at the standard Mercator map and you see that Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, and yet Africa is actually fourteen times the size of Greenland! You could fit the USA, Greenland, India, China, Spain, France, Germany and the UK into Africa and still have room for most of Eastern Europe. We know Africa is a massive land mass, but the maps rarely tell us how massive.” A gripping eyewitness account of a major 20th-century military conflict by the UK's most popular writer on geopolitics A gripping eyewitness account of a major 20th-century military conflict by the UK’s most popular writer on geopolitics The shattering of Yugoslavia in the 1990s showed that, after nearly 50 years of peace, war could return to Europe. It came to its bloody conclusion in Kosovo in 1999. Tim Marshall, then diplomatic editor at Sky News, was on the ground covering the Kosovo War. This is his illuminating account of how events unfolded, a thrilling journalistic memoir drawing on personal experience, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with intelligence officials from five countries. Twenty years on from the war’s end, with the rise of Russian power, a weakened NATO and stalled EU expansion, this story is more relevant than ever, as questions remain about the possibility of conflict on European soil. Utterly gripping, this is Tim Marshall at his very best: behind the lines, under fire and full of the insight that has made him one of Britain’s foremost writers on geopolitics. Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire: The Inside Story of Europe’s Last War by Tim Marshall – eBook DetailsThese diverse experts inspire audiences globally, creating a long-lasting impact on the people they engage with.… View more.

Shadowplay By Tim Marshall | Used | 9781783964451 | World of Shadowplay By Tim Marshall | Used | 9781783964451 | World of

The author, Tim Marshall, was a reporter for Sky News. He tells us that this book was first published in 2002 but in Serbo-Croat but now it has been translated. Finally, having spent 10 years in the region, and having used so few of the local words, it’s amazing how many spelling mistakes Tim manage to make in this book (Batjanica, Gotev je, persistently writing dj instead of đ and many more).Originally from Leeds, Tim arrived at broadcasting from the road less traveled. Not a media studies or journalism graduate, in fact not a graduate at all, after a wholly unsuccessful career as a painter and decorator he worked his way through newsroom nightshifts, and unpaid stints as a researcher and runner before eventually securing himself a foothold on the first rung of the broadcasting career ladder. New & useful information: (4/5)
I really appreciate that this book exists. Much has been written about the Yugoslav wars leading up to Dayton, but there are far fewer books on the subsequent ongoing conflict in Kosovo. Kosovo doesn’t seem to have received the attention it is due, so I’m glad when a book published in 2019 is focused on it. Marshall also documented some of the political machinations happening in Serbia and among the NATO-allied countries that I hadn’t heard before. He sort of yada-yada-yada’d the last 18-or-so years of Balkan history, but I don’t blame him. As he put it, the rest of the world has been distracted from the Balkans, perhaps justifiably so. I would love it if his next book examined the political landscape of the Balkans in the 21st century. It also reveals the inconvenient truth of how much the foreign intelligence services had to do with both making the case for bombing (KVM being run by CIA, the Rambouillet ultimatum etc.) as well as organizing the opposition to topple Milošević. Is that democracy? Serbia is in the same situation today with Vučić regarding freedoms and abuse, but no one seems to care, because of one small difference: he suits the West. He is esteemed for his unique capacity to contextualise current affairs. He has extensively analysed, for instance, how geography influences the ways states behave and interact with one another. In his writing on Russian foreign policy, for example, he discusses how the flatland between the Baltic Sea and Carpathian Mountains – modern-day Poland – has for centuries made Russia vulnerable to invasion from Western armies. This has fuelled a historical view amongst Russian leaders of Belarus and Ukraine as buffer zones between Western forces and Moscow, and we can see this view rearing its head in the recent invasion of Ukraine.

Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire: The Inside Story

It feels like you have been dropped into the middle of the book rather than at the beginning. A lot of information and names are thrown at you without any context or summation of what is going on and why we are where we are. From the British strategy to NATO to the Serbs to the KLA it all feels a bit of complex mess. Hang in there. I made a list of names and positions as I went. Essentially the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) ‘intend to liberate Kosovo from Serbian rule’. They want independence. They see the Serbs as the oppressor. This would be more interesting if Tim Marshall had written a history of the war and put it into the sweeping historical context as he does in Prisoners of Geography, instead this is an OK war reporters memoir with the bare bones of what happened. Tim has been shot with bird pellet in Cairo, bruised by the police in Tehran, arrested by Serbian intelligence, detained in Damascus, declared persona non grata in Croatia, hit over the head with a plank of wood in London, bombed by the RAF in Belgrade, and tear-gassed all over the world.Technology may seem to overcome the distances between us in both mental and physical space, but it is easy to forget that the land where we live, work and raise our children is hugely important, and that the choices of those who lead the seven billion inhabitants of this planet will to some degree always be shaped by the rivers, mountains, deserts, lakes and seas that constrain us all – as they always have.” A somewhat cheeky republished book (originally written in 2002), no doubt to capitalise on Marshall's success with his recent geo-political work. It is however a decent read.