Edith Cavell, By Diana Souhami

Known to most only as the executed nurse who believed that "Patriotism is not enough", Edith Cavell emerges from this fine biography as a far more compelling figure than her marble myth suggests.

The matron of a Brussels hospital, she was shot by occupying Germans in October 1915. Souhami not only fills in the nursing background: Cavell was a capable reformer in the Nightingale line, with "a frosty way of enforcing discipline". She shows Cavell's dogged support for the Belgian resistance.

Gottfried Benn, the German doctor-writer who saw her shot, thought that "she acted as man towards the Germans and deserved to be punished as a man". As Souhami notes, her posthumous fate as a propaganda vehicle diminishes her values and her valour.