Review: No Tomorrow, by Luke Jennings
Codename Villanelle was one of the most fun books I read in 2017. I was disappointed by the hit BBC series “Killing Eve” which was based on it, and was reluctant to give this book…
Review: The London Cage, by Helen Fry
In the end, this is a book about morality. The London Cage was a top secret interrogation centre set up by British intelligence during the Second World War. Located in Kensington Palace Gardens, it was…
Review: Night of Camp David, by Fletcher Knebel
The story about this book goes something like this: Published in 1965 and a best-seller at the time, this was not Fletcher Knebel’s best work. That would be Seven Days in May, a successful thriller…
A Tale of Two Revolutions
The following is the text of my talk at Tbilisi State University on 30 November 2018. I’d like us all to imagine that it is 100 years ago today, the 30th of November 1918. The…
Review: Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Emigré Theories, by Catherine Andreyev
Lieutenant General Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov rose steadily in the ranks of the Red Army until finally put in charge of one of Stalin’s “shock armies” and entrusted with the defence of Kiev during the German…
Review: The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, The Russians and the Jazz Age, by Timothy Phillips
Timothy Phillips has written a gripping account of the secret war between the British intelligence services and the Bolsheviks during the 1920s. Based largely on documents he unearthed in the National Archives, this is a…
Review: The Spy and the Traitor – The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, by Ben MacIntyre
Was Michael Foot, leader of the British Labour Party, a Soviet agent? Was Jack Jones, head of the country’s largest trade union, one as well? According to KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, they both were. (Foot’s…
Review: Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was, by Sjón
I read this book during the same week that I saw a theatrical adaptation of Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague. Both works are concerned with epidemics, but there the similarity ends. While the Camus novel…
Review: Fear – Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward
You know how you go to see a movie and all the best parts were already in the preview? That’s a bit like what happened to Bob Woodward’s 360 page book about the Trump White…
Review: Hiroshima, by John Hersey
John Hersey’s account of the lives of six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was first published just a year after the events. Despite the passage of more than seventy years, the work endures,…