Robert Shiels

Vladimir Putin’s penchant for assassinating his political enemies is nothing new for Russian rulers. His former employers, the KGB and, before that, the NKVD, were dab hands at it. Stalin’s order to murder Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico has plenty of parallels today giving this book con

In this true, but often scarcely-believable, story Neil Root explains as best can be done the personal history of Peter Rachman before the latter arrived in Britain. His mysterious background relies for the most part on Rachman’s own undocumented explanations.

The unsolved murder of Stevan Markovic, the Serbian bodyguard and associate of French film star Alain Delon, became an immense scandal in the Paris of 1968 engulfing the highest politicans in the land and highlighted Delon’s connections with gangsters. Rumours also abounded about orgies organ

The ‘CIA book program’ during the Cold War aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire ideas of revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture. This was at a time when the Iron Curtain, forming a long and heavily guarded border, divided Europe. From New York headquarter

On Tuesday 4 May 1926, two million British workers withdrew their labour in one of the great failures of industrial management. Politically, many thought events were indicative of something sinister to come, a rising similar to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

A new book explores how and why governments have failed to tackle money laundering, writes Robert Shiels. Without money laundering, it appears, few major crimes of acquisition would be worth the trouble. In the old days, in other words, shops, post offices and banks were robbed for their cash, and v

Robert Shiels reviews a new book on a man now seen as fascism's first adherent. Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès, was the first late modern politician in the West to emerge politically as a populist, an antisemite, and what might now be called a fascist militiaman.

Robert Shiels reviews a new book on Emily Anderson, the Irish woman who became Britain's greatest code-breaker. It is no exaggeration for Jackie Ui Chionna to subtitle her biography the ‘secret life’ of Emily Anderson. The paucity of relevant departmental material and Anderson’s av

Perhaps the Baltic states, those around the sea there, in recent decades have not been given as full attention as they ought to have. International politics have now changed everything. The core arguments by Oliver Moody are, first, that these states have been forced to develop the kind of resilienc

This substantial work is a study of the intellectuals who migrated to Britain during the 1930s from countries in Central and Eastern Europe that were overrun by fascism. It was thought that between 1933 and 1940 about 100,000 such refugees arrived in Britain, although many merely passed through

Robert Shiels reviews a new book linking industrial pollution to a cluster of serial killers.

Robert Shiels reviews a new book on the less popular of the two things said to be certain in life. Death scholarship is well-established. Dr Molly Conisbee, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has studied many aspects of death and mourning.

Robert Shiels reviews a new book on one of the most notorious crimes in recent English history. The public must surely wish to have a comprehensive narrative of the course of conduct by a medically qualified person resulting in the deaths of many babies, and they have it with this book.

Robert Shiels looks at the "story of law’s reasonable person" — one that has "many beginnings and no end", according to Professor Valentin Jeutner, of Lund University, Sweden. Identifying the concept of a "reasonable person" is not an easy task, given, as this professor discovered, there

Robert Shiels reviews a new book on an infamous series of London murders. The purportedly whole story of the grim events at 10 Rillington Place, London has been offered to the public in different forms over the years but what version is complete, and separately, an accurate one?