For anyone looking for a version of Gone Girl set in North London, this is not the book for you. Or maybe it is — the first half, I mean. Because this a clever book…Read more…

This book, written in 1955, is essential reading today for anyone interested in democratic socialism. Democratic Socialists of America, one of the successor organizations of the Socialist Party, is…Read more…

As someone who both writes and publishes books, I was keen to read a well-reviewed, short text aimed at people like myself. I was not disappointed. This is a clear, well-written introduction to the…Read more…

Let me begin by saying that Major L H Manderstam is not someone I’d want to invite over for dinner. This memoir, published in 1985 shortly after the author’s death, is full of obnoxious…Read more…

This is a brilliant book and I encourage all my non-Jewish friends to read it. My Jewish friends will not need to read it because what Baddiel writes — and he writes really well —…Read more…

Nearly twenty years ago, science journalist Gary Taubes wrote an article for the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times reporting that some eminent scientists were beginning to re-think the…Read more…

According to author Mark Felton, the people put in charge of keeping Adolf Hitler safe and well actually created the modern practice of body-guarding, sometimes known as ‘close…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…