The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
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...
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...
Orwell & The Past He who controls the past controls the future. Past time in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a shadowy affair, a matter of casual inferences and stray fragments of detail. There may at one point be talk of the nuclear warhead that fell on Colchester during...
To write the history of one regiment covering the years from 1969 to the current day would be no mean task, but here we have a book covering the seven regiments of the Household Division over this same period. It is indeed a tour de force and compulsive reading for...
If we set aside social and economic institutions like the family and work, cathedrals (along with bishops and dioceses) are the oldest organisations to function in England, with records of continuous activity going back to about the year 600. Nicholas Orme is...
KENNEDY 35 is the third novel in Charles Cumming’s intriguing BOX 88 series, featuring Lachlan Kite. Kite is a great modern take on the classic spy hero: tough, resilient and flawed. A scholarship boy who went to one of the most famous public schools in the world....
The young Mátyás Rákosi (1892–1971) loved London. The son of a Jewish shopkeeper in southern Hungary, he had made his way there via Hamburg in 1913. Already a socialist, Rákosi had immediately joined the Communist Club in London’s Fitzrovia, whose Hungarian members...
Many congratulations on the Those Must Be The Guards. The title is from the great Sir John Moore during the retreat to Corunna in 1809, who made the remark when noticing the Foot Guards maintaining their discipline when all about had lost theirs. Would a Guards...
