The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
In 1970, there were so many Soviet intelligence agents operating undercover in London that MI5 was hopelessly over-extended. The scale and extent of KGB espionage operations in the UK, threatening to overwhelm not just MI5 but the security of the state. It resulted...
Stalingrad: Researching the Lighthouse Stalingrad, the greatest battle of any theatre of conflict during the Second World War. That’s the story I had always been told growing up. As a nine-year-old boy in the mid-1970s, I was given as a birthday present a book of the...
The Emperor Vitellius was not a man of whom Roman historians have ever been proud. He was one of four emperors in 69 CE, the year after the death of Nero, and was famed mainly for eating massive helpings of seafood. Since his nasty death by a thousand cuts, slowly...
Migration & The End of Empire However you line up the different factors involved, there’s no doubt that immigration played a major role in the unravelling of the western half of the Roman imperial system. By the end of the fifth century AD, from Anglo-Saxons north...
T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the most intriguing individuals of the twentieth century, who remarkably had strong associations with buildings and places in London. At the beginning of the First World War between October to November 1914, he was...
A Persian Journey ‘This Persian journey was the best in all my life’. I came across this note in a diary my grandmother Dorothy (‘Dottie’) Wellesley had kept during a trip to Persia in 1927. She added these words nearly twenty-five years later when she was writing her...
Secrets & The Public Interest In October 2005, while the late MI6 and MI5 officer Walter Bell’s personal papers were gathering dust , undiscovered in the basement of his London home, the historian Peter Hennessy, in the prestigious annual Cambridge Hinsley...
A few words about the title of the book: Those Must Be The Guards. In March 1919 the Guards marched through London as part of the great victory parade. The Times reported rather grandly on the event: ‘A joyous welcome to the Guards ….. fighting through to the end and...
Holmes Is Where the Heart Is Crime comes to south-east London again, but this time in the form of an innovative adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story, The Valley of Fear, at The Southwark Playhouse. The drama covers two stories - the mystery of the murder of John...
NATO’s Greatest Achievement Readers may rightly wonder why NATO, so pre-eminent as Europe’s security foundation, is so timid in its response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. To fully grasp this, we need to look back to NATO’s perhaps greatest achievement, namely its...
