Reviews

Two questions: who do you trust? Who do you really trust? If that is the first sift for the intelligence services, then it is notable that counter-espionage officers in MI5 had been long wary about disgruntled KGB officers claiming to be willing to betray their motherland. That point from the prolog

Treason pays it would appear – for publishers at any rate. This year has seen a slew of new books on the the young idealists who spied for the Soviet Union. Stalin’s Apostles by Antonia Senior, currently Radio 4’s book of the week, fairly rattles along providing a valuable new ove

Roy Cohn turned aggression, deception and contempt for professional restraint into instruments of power. In American Scoundrel, Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark trace his path from the Rosenberg prosecution and McCarthy hearings to a lucrative legal career marked by intimidation, ethical misconduct and

As a small boy I once joined a group of classmates to peer at a grainy black and white photo brought in by one of the boys whose uncle had fought in the Malayan ‘Emergency’. The subject of our ghoulish fascination was an image of smiling Scottish soldiers displaying the severed heads of

There’s no need for a spoiler alert with any history book exploring the life and reign of Henry VIII, arguably Britain’s most famous, possibly notorious, sovereign. Born in 1491, second surviving son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York - the former an accomplished military leader, the la

Can the biography of a woman who did not exist, yet is so well known in Western culture, ever be written?  Edith Hall’s latest work on the classical world has taken her an academic career of immersion in the Greek classics, of getting to ‘know’ Medea every time they have met.

In August 1969, members of a counter-cultural family led by Charles Manson killed some of Hollywood’s ‘beautiful people’, and others living nearby. The killers left be­hind evidence intended by them to implicate Black radi­cals and to trigger an apocalyptic race war.

From ancient sages to contemporary leaders, there is broad agreement that judgement is an indispensable quality a person must possess for making good decisions. Even the staunchest AI advocates, who explain all the things which AI already can or will soon do better than humans, emphasise that human

From Guatemala, a Central American country whose recent past is marked by war and volatility, comes a highly readable history of coercive adoptions and forced disappearance of children.

Geoff Andrews’ Radicals traces the working-class traditions, educational movements and moral values that shaped modern Britain and the Labour Party. This thoughtful review praises the book’s erudition and sense of loss, while questioning its limited attention to nationalism and regional

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

During his long summer holidays in 1934, staying with a school friend’s family in Ireland, historian and author Richard Cobb remarked on what, to him, seemed like a peculiar practice: tram passengers discreetly crossing themselves every time the tram passed a church or roadside shrine, which a