Richard Hillary: the authorised biography of a Second World War fighter pilot and author of "The Last Enemy" David Ross Grub Street, 414pp, £20 ISBN 1902304454

Numerous biographies, films, plays and novels, including Sebastian Faulks's The Fatal Englishman, have been based on the life of Richard Hillary, whose The Last Enemy is arguably the greatest memoir to have come out of the Second World War. First published six months before his death in January 1943, it gained him immediate fame, and remains in print today.

Most of David Ross's biography concerns the last four of Hillary's 23 years, and no one reading this dense work can doubt the amount of research undertaken. What Ross lacks in style is compensated for in energy - no stone is left unturned, no scrap of information wasted. Just occasionally, this becomes cloying: do we really need to know the numbers of every Spitfire on every patrol that Hillary flew in? But Ross, wisely, never allows his authorial voice to smother his material. The liberal use of letters in full, both to and from Hillary, as well as lengthy, transcribed recollections, makes for absorbing reading. One is left with not only a clear impression of Hillary as a complex personality, but also a vivid picture of the climate and atmosphere of the time.

Hillary's story has a melancholy resonance. Despite a certain worldliness (he travelled round Europe on his own aged 13 and lost his virginity at 16), by the start of the Battle of Britain, he and his colleagues were still painfully young. But the Richard Hillary that emerges a year after being shot down over the English Channel is very different from the young man who brashly boasted that his role as a fighter pilot was "exciting, individual and disinterested". He suffered horrific burns to his face and hands, and it was as though he had leapt immediately into middle age. All his original friends from training days had been killed; his new friends were all much older, and, after having a brief affair with Merle Oberon, he struck up a relationship with a woman of 44.

There was a terrible inevitability about his death. His hands were so badly damaged he could barely use a knife and fork, and yet he returned to the battle in the skies. On the night he died, he was flying a heavy twin-engined bomber in icy, pitch-black conditions. Unquestionably, he should never have been allowed to return to flying; that he did was perhaps the result of the terrible guilt he felt about surviving when most of his friends died.

Just as The Last Enemy spoke for many pilots, this biography could be said to represent not just Hillary, but an entire generation of doomed youth.

James Holland is completing a novel about the Battle of Britain

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