George Millar was born in 1910 and educated at Loretto and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read Architecture. After a brief spell as a journalist on The Daily Telegraph, he joined The Daily Express, becoming its Paris correspondent.

During the war he initially served with the Rifle Brigade. He was captured in North Africa, escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp and safely made his way back to England via occupied France and the Pyrenees - an escape he later wrote about in Horned Pigeon (1946). He then returned to France as an agent to serve alongside the French Resistance, an experience he described in Maquis (1945), and for which he was awarded both the Legion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre.

After the war, in summer interludes from farming 1000 acres at Sydling St Nicholas in Dorset, George and his wife Isabel cruised the Baltic, European waters and the Mediterranean in a succession of ‘classic’ yachts; the 30 ton Truant; Serica, a 16 ton sloop now in a Canadian museum; the 10 metre Norwegian cutter Irene VIII; and the 50 ft yawl Amokura, the star of Oyster River.

George Millar’s Maquis, a classic memoir of the French resistance and the war against the German occupying forces, was published in 1945 just after the end of the war. He reveals what it was like to be hunted day and night by the Gestapo and vividly describes the incredible risks run by ordinary French men and women. From his initial training in England to sabotage operations behind enemy lines, this is the most famous account of the resistance against the Germans.