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…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

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…Read more…

Yen Lo, the Communist Chinese villain in The Manchurian Candidate was a big fan of Andrew Salter’s work. Andrew Salter, now considered one of the founders of behaviour therapy, published this…Read more…

What I liked most about this book was that the authors raise questions without answering them. Instead of asserting, as so many books of this type do, that (fill in name here) conspired to kill…Read more…

Imagine if at the height of the Second World War psychiatrists had the opportunity to pluck one of the Nazi leaders out of Germany and subject him to years of close observation. Imagine what we…Read more…