In 1942, with a black-market chicken under his arm, Leo Marks left his father`s famous bookshop, 84 charing cross road, and went to war. He was twenty-two and a cryptographer of genius. In ”Between silk and cyanide”, his critically acclaimed account of his time in SOE, Marks tells how he revolutionized the code-making techniques of the Allies, trained some of the most famous agents, who dropped into France including Violette Szabo and `the White Rabbit`, and why he wrote haunting verses including his ”The Life that I have” poem. He reveals for the first time the disastrous dimensions of the code war between SOE and the Germans in Holland; how the Germans were fooled into thinking a Secret Army was operating in the Fatherland itself; and how and why he broke General de Gaulle`s secret code. Both thrilling and Poignant, Marks` book is truly one of the last great Second World War memoirs.