British crime writer Mark Billingham has written 16 novels in the DI Tom Thorne series, most of them set in North London in the present day, and all of them in sequential order — until…

I first heard of the Lockhart Plot, as many others will have done, in the British television series from the 1980s, Reilly: Ace of Spies. That was a largely fictionalised version of the story, but…

There is a sub-genre of crime fiction that is set in war-time. And most often the war is the Second World War. Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Robert Harris’ Fatherland and Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series are…

This is a wonderful book. People will read it because J. Posadas and the Trotskyist sect he led for decades were, for want of a better phrase, completely bonkers. A proponent of UFOlogy, thermonuclear war…

Imagine for a moment that in America there are millions of people who don’t like foreigners or people of colour, who are often fundamentalist Christians, who label all their opponents “Marxists” and who have made…

Rightly considered a classic, this short book was published in the year of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. We should have been able to read it nearly…

The danger of a book like this one is that it could encourage the fetishistic collection of Nazi memorabilia. There is already a fairly large community of people who collect such things, and some (including…

Brian Lett is the author of a number of excellent works of military history and I looked forward to this one, not least due to the intriguing title. Unfortunately, the title may be a bit…

This is history as it should be written. Philippe Sands has taken the story of one Nazi war criminal and turned it into a sprawling tale of love, family, truth, lies and memory. The story…