Robert Shiels

As the AI boom begins to wobble with vast valuations of non-profitmaking companies now being questioned, Robert Shiels, enjoys a timely study of the world’s first global crash. Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented

Please note a preliminary point: the title of this book refers to ‘RAF Terror’. The list of abbreviations in the book does not assist the reader with the relevant meaning of ‘RAF’. There is only a brief mention of the full name of the organisation well into the book. &nb

It is a sign of the passage of time that the subtitle to this biography should explicitly identify Bernard Montgomery as a ‘World War II general’. ‘Monty’ and a few, but not many, other generals were well known as celebrities to the wartime public. Montgomery was an outsider,

In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh (pronounced ‘Murdock’ by Americans), an attorney, was found guilty of the murders of his wife Maggie and their younger son Paul at their home in South Carolina. The circumstances of the deaths were violent; both having been shot. The news outlets produced a n

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.