While fans wait for the arrival of the seventh Slough House novel by British author Mick Herron, he has thrown some crumbs to his audience with a series of novellas — this being the most…

Anne Applebaum is a great historian, a terrific journalist and a strong opponent of authoritarian regimes everywhere. But this book disappoints. It begins with a party she and her Polish husband hosted in 1999. Their…

When I first discovered Mick Herron’s ‘Slough House’ series of books, I got completely hooked, and read all six of them in a binge lasting 24 days. And now, like so many other fans of…

This is the story of Ursula Kuczynski, a Soviet spy who was instrumental in ensuring that Stalin was able to build an atomic bomb. So at first glance, not an entirely sympathetic character. And yet…

A young Saudi man, radicalised by the experience of seeing his father beheaded for his iconoclastic views, grows into the world’s most fearsome terrorist — known as Saracen.  Deciding to take revenge on the House…

Few people knew as much about the highly-secretive SOE – whose task, according to Churchill, was to ‘set Europe ablaze’ – as M.R.D. Foot. This short book is an introduction to the work of the…

First published more than 40 years ago, this book tells the unbelievable story of the CIA’s experiments with mind control. Some of these even pre-date the founding of the CIA itself. Its forerunner, the OSS,…

In many murder mysteries, the question of ‘who did it’ is less important than ‘how they did it’ – and that is certainly the case with this book. I came to read it because I…

At the height of the Second World War, Allied intelligence services grew increasingly interested in the personal life of the German Führer, Adolf Hitler. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) spent months developing an elaborate…

There are not many novels — or at least not many novels I’ve read — that are set largely in libraries and archives, and whose heroes are historians. In this book, practically everyone could be…