Henry Hemming is a great story-teller — and this is a great story. In June 1940, during the ‘darkest hour’ in modern British history, when a German invasion of England seemed only…Read more…

Go into a bookstore these days and often the only book you’ll find by Sinclair Lewis is It Can’t Happen Here, a satirical look at the rise of a fascist regime in America in the…Read more…

The revelation in the late 1990s that the British had seriously considered assassinating Hitler was a journalistic bombshell. Very quickly, the National Archives (then the Public Records Office)…Read more…

Hemingway wrote this short collection of vignettes during the very last years of his life. And because of that, they are the mature reflections of a great writer looking back at the beginning of…Read more…

I first read this book around 50 years ago and have read it several times since. When it was reissued in the late 1960s, the publisher touted it as being especially relevant to the political…Read more…

This short book consists mainly of a long and very secret memorandum, illustrated with maps and photographs, prepared by the British in 1944. The document lays out a series of options for killing the…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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,…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…