In 2004 Richard Aldrich wrote that official histories offer Whitehall ‘a useful way of managing the past, offering a judicious mixture of concession and control’. His further feelings on the subject are more clearly revealed by the subtitle of his recent GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (reviewed in the June edition of LR), a book which is evidently intended to pre-empt the official history due out soon, a companion to Christopher Andrew’s official history of MI5, and Keith Jeffery’s book under review here.

I did the same with Razor’s Edge: The Unofficial History of the Falklands War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), but I was confident that my bilingual and mainly military focus would complement rather than compete with the official history’s Anglocentric focus on policy. Not so Michael Smith’s book, which