The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
A couple of years ago at the Chalke History Festival, General Sir Simon Mayall, a popular member of the red trouser brigade, Balliol man, and retired military top brass strode onto stage to rapturous applause. Introducing his recently published memoirs he delivered a...
Queen High is CJ Carey’s sequel to her much acclaimed novel Widowland, both books are counter factual dystopian novels in a similar vein to 1984, Fatherland and Brave New World. They are set in a 1950s Britain where Lord Halifax became Prime Minister rather than...
Seizing Eichmann He was walking down the street clutching a large bouquet of flowers, a smiling family man by the name of Ricardo Klement. He was looking forward to celebrating his silver wedding anniversary that evening. When he reached his house on Garibaldi Street...
Jimmy Burns’ biography of Walter Bell, charts the life of one of Britain’s most successful and influential intelligence officers. The fact that Bell is so little known outside of intelligence circles testifies to this success. Walter Bell appears to have been a...
Jimmy Burns, who was Walter Bell? When Water Bell died in January 2004, aged ninety-four, the details of his life-not least of his professional career in the British secret services during a defining period in the history of modern espionage and security-remained a...
At a time when the UK is at war by proxy – providing intelligence, weapons and training to Ukraine – and relying on Article Five of the NATO treaty for our own security, this is a most timely book. The author, Sten Renning, is a Danish professor who has been a student...
Russian spies have moved into cyberspace. Their digital fingerprint is on the 2016 American elections, and all over the cultural wars. They find existing cracks in Western discourse, around Brexit or Black Lives Matter, for example, and seek to rip them still wider....
Are we in a new Cold War? If not, how is it best to describe the struggle between China and Western democracies? Some have suggested “hot peace”— but such wordplay doesn’t get us far. In fact, as far as intelligence and national security are concerned, the West is...
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...
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...
