Christopher Andrew
Whispers in Downing Street
The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers
By Richard J Aldrich, Rory Cormac
William Collins 606pp £30 order from our bookshop
The biggest gap in the biographies of many prime ministers concerns their use of intelligence. Histories of the postwar Labour government, for example, give no hint that Clement Attlee, at his own request, had far more private meetings with the director-general of MI5 than any other 20th-century prime minister. Books on the Blair years, by contrast, show much greater interest in intelligence. ‘Controversy over intelligence defines Tony Blair’s government’, write Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac in The Black Door. Their pioneering book is the first to examine how all British prime ministers since the early 20th century have used intelligence. It is also a very good read.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore