SAS: Rogue Heroes is a curious, unsettling mix of T E Lawrence-style romanticism – impulsive individualism in the desert sands – and outbreaks of grand guignol: tunics smeared with “blood and pulp”; bodies reduced to separate lumps of “smoking human flesh”. Even in the storm of war, some SAS violence was sociopathic – these were men who, occasionally, could not be stopped.

Stirling’s first group of “rogue warriors” was drawn from all sorts of backgrounds and Macintyre familiarises us with their (often surprising) hinterlands while never letting us feel quite at ease with some of them. There was grammar school boy Johnny Cooper, who, despite looking like Private Pike from Dad’s Army, was preternaturally tough. There was amateur boxing champion Reg Seekings, “hard, in the way that very few people are truly hard… [with] no compunction about the shedding of blood”. But he had vulnerability, too: dyslexia made his report-writing a battle. Everyone else “would be asleep and I’d still be struggling with my notes”, he recalled.