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Death to Order: A Conversation with Simon Ball

Death to Order: A Conversation with Simon Ball

Assassination rarely achieves its aims, the academic maintains, but it endures as a useful tool to shape behaviour the international stage.
Simon Ball

Hello Simon. Your book, Death to Order, suggests that assassination is as much about signalling as it is about elimination. How important is the message sent by a killing compared to the actual removal of a target? It depends on the kind of assassination campaign. The...

Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee, by Charlie Higson

Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee, by Charlie Higson

A lively survey of English and British monarchs that combines humour with a broadly informative narrative of the nation’s past.

Whether you are interested in being introduced to British history, or you are familiar with it, Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee, will prove to be a find. Borne out of a successful podcast of the same name, Charlie Higson has written a book which entertains and educates in...

Andrew Taylor on A Schooling in Murder

Andrew Taylor on A Schooling in Murder

The author discusses the wartime setting, narrative choices and historical research behind his latest murder mystery.

Andrew Taylor, A Schooling in Murder, sees you revisit to the 20th century, the dying embers of WW2 and a rural setting. Give us a brief outline of your most recent book. It’s a Golden Age whodunit set in a third-rate girls’ boarding school in the closing months of...

A Woman Named Edith: Emigre, Photographer and Secret Agent – The Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor Hart, by Daria Santini

A Woman Named Edith: Emigre, Photographer and Secret Agent – The Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor Hart, by Daria Santini

A biography of Edith Tudor Hart that highlights her role in Soviet espionage while reassessing her life as a politically driven photographer.

There is something fitting in the idea of a photographer spy. Both espionage and photography require close attention to detail, an awareness of perspective, and an ability to manipulate reality. Sometimes, usefully, the activities overlap. Perhaps the most influential...

Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination, by Simon Ball

Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination, by Simon Ball

A survey of modern political assassinations that questions how far such killings have truly shaped historical outcomes.

On 28 June 1914, a collection of Bosnian terrorists gathered in Sarajevo to target the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, Franz Ferdinand. It was a chaotic operation, with the first go not even attempted. A later grenade missed the Archduke’s motorcar and instead...

Drinking, Typing and Gossiping: US Foreign Correspondents in Europe between the Wars

Drinking, Typing and Gossiping: US Foreign Correspondents in Europe between the Wars

A portrait of the hard-drinking, ambitious American correspondents who chronicled Europe’s slide toward war in the interwar years.

The 1920s and 30s were a golden age for American foreign correspondents in Europe. Until 1920, American newspapers had taken most of their international news from press agencies such as Associated Press. But during the 1920s, American papers started relying on their...

George Orwell: Life and Legacy, by Robert Colls

George Orwell: Life and Legacy, by Robert Colls

A lively and at times polemical biography that challenges Orwell’s mythology while presenting a flawed, contradictory and influential writer.

In George Orwell: Life and Legacy, Robert Colls provides a sharp and very lively examination of the man born Eric Arthur Blair, exploring how a "lower upper middle class" Etonian transformed into the world’s defining political writer of the twentieth century. Colls...

An Interview with Daria Santini

An Interview with Daria Santini

The author talks through her background in German literature, her inclination towards cultural history and possible biographies of 20th-century women.

What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? As a student of German literature, I wrote my PhD thesis on the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, whose life and work spanned the decades from the 1860s to the 1940s. It was a period dense with momentous...

Émigré, Photographer, Secret Agent: An Extraordinary Life

Émigré, Photographer, Secret Agent: An Extraordinary Life

A communist activist and Soviet agent, the Austrian-born Edith Tudor-Hart helped drive modernist photography and set in motion Britain’s most notorious spy ring.

Who was Edith Tudor-Hart? For a long time, and especially after the revelation of her crucial role in the creation of modern Britain's most notorious spy ring – the Cambridge Five – she existed more as a cipher than as a real person. I first encountered her name well...