Christopher Andrew is the doyen of the academic study of intelligence in the UK. He has some serious progenitors, among them Professor Sir Harry Hinsley, but Andrew has really made the field his own. Indeed, there are few academics working on intelligence in the UK who cannot trace the origins of their work back to […]
In September 1656 a London apothecary, Anthony Hinton, was arrested on suspicion of using his premises beside the Old Bailey as a clearing house for letters on their way to exiled Royalists on the Continent. Interrogated by Cromwell’s own intelligence officers, Hinton quickly confessed his guilt and gave up the names of a number of […]
As Gill Bennett relates in this superb book, a compelling mixture of history, anecdote and historiography, the Zinoviev Letter arrived in Britain in 1924 and has never really gone away. Three weeks before the general election of October that year, a decoded telegram reached the headquarters of Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in a villa in […]
The exhibition at the Imperial War Museum marking the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth runs until 1 March 2009 and is well worth visiting. If you can’t make it, this book serves as a kind of catalogue to it, with double-spread film stills and a large format providing a touch of coffee-table glamour; yet it’s […]
For years the Imperial War Museum has been collecting, unobtrusively, the recollections not only of members of the conventional armed forces, but of those secret agents who survived and could be persuaded to talk. Roderick Bailey has been through all the relevant records and here assembles with great skill a picture of the Special Operations […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
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Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm