In four segments, you can hear all about casting, auditions and the hilarity/horror of bootcamp with Dale Dye. Walk in the footsteps of Easy Company 506 – the real Band of Brothers – for the 20th anniversary of the epic HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. Although a history, Churchill’s Band of Brothers reads like an action-packed spy thriller complete with daring operations, betrayal, murder, escape, and the hunt for justice. This extended to ensuring that every character in the series was a real person who had actually been present. Despite my initial reservations, this book is an enthralling read, with excitement, suspense, intrigue, and tragedy in equal measure.

Once you get out of the weeds of the flashbacks, and into the meat of the second mission, everything sails along smoothly.

Jendresen went to Hershey, Pennsylvania, to meet the real Capt Winters on his chicken farm, and pore over the cache of letters and journals which Easy Company veterans had sent to their former leader. Out on the Town with This Season's Breakout Stars", Maxim (October 2008); accessed 15 December 2008. Damian Lewis was interviewed at the BBC TV Centre on Friday, most likley promotional work for the upcoming BBC television film Stolen. The mood is goofy and snickering, until a drill sergeant arrives and barks that they are no longer known by their “civilian name”; at boot camp, they are their counterparts in Easy Company, and it is 1942.

With Lewis still uncertain about his fate, there was silence in the room – until LucasFilm producer Tony To asked: “So, ready for boot camp in March?The attention to detail that ran through Band of Brothers came, he added, from the veterans of Easy Company themselves. It worked, and Blair’s eldest son Euan received a work placement on the Band of Brothers set into the bargain.

I guess that this story would only have been possible with the release of so many of the secret files from WWII. During a decade spent reporting from around the world Lewis lived in deserts, rainforests, jungles and chaotic third world cities. I stopped reading it after a couple of chapters because the characters were stilted and unrealistic. McCole, who had been silently fuming for the best part of two decades, was aggrieved all over again. The dedication ceremony will be hosted by three-time World Series winning Major League baseball pitcher Curt Schilling and former Governor of Pennsylvania and Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge.Having played classical guitar since the age of 13, Lewis graduated to the steel string acoustic after being inspired by Elvis Presley. Despite working off of first-hand accounts, however, there are pieces of the story that were ultimately details left out of Band of Brothers. Lewis has said that he "went to English boarding schools and grew up around people very much like [his character] Soames and in a milieu very much like the Forsytes '". Now it turned out that Spielberg and Hanks wanted another chat – and he was in no shape to face them. Miraculously, two escaped, triggering one of the most-extraordinary Nazi-hunting operations, in an unrelenting bid to seek out those responsible for the deaths of their comrades.