The Siege: 'fresh and gripping' account of the Iranian embassy hostage crisis

"For those of us of a certain age (62, since you ask), the extraordinary events of 5 May 1980 will remain indelibly etched on our memories," said Andrew Anthony in The Observer .

That day, the SAS stormed the Iranian embassy in London – ending a six-day siege that had begun when six gunmen entered the embassy, taking 26 hostages, four of them Britons. Now, the nation watched "transfixed" as "mysterious" black-clad figures in balaclavas smashed their way into the stuccoed building before killing five of the gunmen and liberating 24 of the hostages (one had already been shot dead by the captors; another died during the assault). In those "few action-packed minutes", the SAS "went from obscurity to global renown".

Now Ben Macintyre , a "seasoned documenter of the British establishment's cloaked histories", has produced an "exhaustive" and "gripping" account of the siege – one that reveals it as a more "complex and thought-provoking" affair than its dramatic denouement suggested.

The gunmen weren't "the Ayatollah's lot", said James Owen in The Sunday Times : they were Arabic-speaking Iranians from the southwest Khuzestan province, who had been relentlessly persecuted by the new Islamic regime. Their leader, "Salim", was a "poetry-loving graduate" who had been radicalised by the execution of his brother by the security services. Macintyre shows that Salim and his fellow gunmen had been "manipulated by Iraqi intelligence", who'd "organised the attack to destabilise Iran". They demanded the release of political prisoners in Khuzestan and their own safe passage out of the UK. Since neither Iran nor Britain was likely to cede to these demands, failure was baked into the mission from the start.

Macintryre revels in the period details, said Colin Freeman in The Telegraph : the Old Spice aftershave the unwashed gunmen drenched themselves in; the John Player Specials sent in by the negotiators to "calm frayed nerves". He captures the "complex power-relationships" inside the embassy: at one point, Salim gathered hostages and hostage-takers together for a "get-to-know-you session".

But hopes of a peaceful ending to the siege were dashed when a confrontation between some of the gunmen and the embassy's "resident Revolutionary Guardsman" resulted in the latter being shot dead. Minutes later, Thatcher sent in the SAS, who abseiled down from the roof and smashed windows to get in. Macintyre has produced a "masterful" narrative that, despite the many books and films on this topic, still feels "fresh and gripping".