Robert Shiels

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?

Robert Shiels reviews a new book on the interface between technology and war. The military-industrial complex of the United States was the subject of a chilling warning by President Eisenhower and a new book reveals how Silicon Valley has morphed to make it ever more deadly.

Robert Shiels reviews a book that sheds light on personalities who shaped 21st-century Russia. With the end of Soviet Russia, there was little in the way of precedent or planning for the political class to follow in the move to a new society and economy. A socialist state does not plan for its own d

Robert Shiels reviews a new book on one of the UK's best-known spying scandals. There is an aphorism along the lines of history is past politics and present politics is future history, and that might well be a suitable introduction to a new book on the Spycatcher affair.