The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Tim Spicer, many congratulations on the new book. What sort of man was Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale? Suave, sophisticated, multi-lingual, highly intelligent, charming but with a core of steel. You mention he was suave and sophisticated but also ruthless. He...
1920 Odessa Ukraine. The Russian Civil War is at its height, a young British man working for Naval Intelligence picks up a report from one of his agents. The crew of the Russian submarine OUTKA are going to mutiny and throw their officers overboard. He leads a party...
In the years just before the First World War, a boy was growing up in Imperial India. He was obstinate and full of life. Still a toddler, he chatted to the servants in Hindustani. His father nicknamed him Kim, after the spy hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, who could...
Across two world wars, women living in occupied countries displayed extraordinary bravery and resilience in running spy networks and gaining intelligence for the Allies, often at great personal risk. To date their stories have largely been missing from the wider...
On the day Britain declared war on Germany, 3 September 1939, Parliament immediately passed The National Service (Armed Forces) Act. All men aged between 18 and 41 were required to register for service. My grandfather John James Doherty ‘JJ’, a talented linguist,...
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...
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...
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....
Calder Walton, what first attracted you to the study of espionage? When I was an undergraduate, I read Christopher Andrew’s ground-breaking book, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB and the West (1999). At the time, I was actually studying medieval history— learning about...
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...
