Dance of the Peacocks

The true story of five talented young men in exile in the time of Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung.

'Altogether they knew five wars, three revolutions and - in the case of Ian Milner, accused in the Cold War of being a spy - a slander.'

Regarded by one critic as 'the best book published in New Zealand in the last twenty years', this is a fascinating story based on letters, diaries and interviews in several countries. It is the story of a group of Rhodes scholars, five young men - James Bertram, Geoffrey Cox, Dan Davin, Ian Milner, John Mulgan - caught up in the turmoil of their times: Spain, Hitler's Germany, Greece and North Africa, Eastern Europe, China. They left New Zealand in the thirties for 'the dreaming spires' of Oxford. War intervened. Only one returned.