Alan Judd

The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce

7 September 2024 9:00 am

Stationed in Paris from 1926 to 1940, the wealthy, debonair ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, often seen as a model for James Bond, was also a supremely effective intelligence officer

The assassination of Georgi Markov bore all the hallmarks of a Russian wet job

6 July 2024 9:00 am

The Bulgarian dissident sailed too close to the wind with his revelations about Tudor Zhivkov in 1978, provoking the dictator to enlist Russian help in eliminating him

If the Nazis had occupied Britain, how many of us would have collaborated?

29 April 2023 9:00 am

Ian Buruma describes three individuals who saved themselves in wartime by betraying others. But none was a ‘typical traitor’, or essentially different from the rest of us

Behind the Five Eyes intelligence alliance

30 July 2022 9:00 am

In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…

People of little interest: MI5’s view of left-wing intellectuals

25 June 2022 9:00 am

If MI5 had a Cold War file on you – paper in those happy days – it didn’t mean they…

The delicate business of monitoring the monarchy

9 October 2021 9:00 am

This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on…

Lambs to the slaughter: the fiasco of the Dieppe Raid, August 1942

31 October 2020 9:00 am

In carefree days which now seem so distant we used occasionally to take the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry. Docking after a long…

It’s easy to forget how many respectable people embraced eugenics

21 February 2020 10:00 pm

Between 1923 and 1931 the publisher Routledge produced ‘Today and Tomorrow’, a series of 110 short books by intellectual luminaries…

The Pearl Harbor fiasco need never have happened

24 January 2020 10:00 pm

It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when…

The coldest war of all: sabotaging the Nazis in Norway

11 January 2020 9:00 am

Anyone mildly interested in the second world war probably knows two things about our wartime alliance with Norway, following its…

Betrayal in Berlin – a small but important part of the Cold War story

12 October 2019 9:00 am

The Berlin Tunnel was an Anglo-American eavesdropping operation mounted against Russian-controlled East Berlin in 1955–56.  It was a technical and…

It’s judo, not chess, that’s Putin’s game

18 May 2019 9:00 am

These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti…

Senior Nazis inspect the wreckage of the Wolf’s Lair after the failed Stauffenberg plot, July 1944.

Why didn’t they try harder to assassinate Hitler?

15 December 2018 9:00 am

Awareness of German opposition to Hitler is usually limited to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to blow up the wretched…

Did the notorious Zinoviev letter ever exist?

18 August 2018 9:00 am

This is a well-written, scrupulously researched and argued account of an enduring mystery that neatly illustrates the haphazard interactions of…

A recruiting poster from 1917, establishing the Wrens

Getting women on board: the history of the WRNS

20 January 2018 9:00 am

This book is a thoroughly researched account of the parts played by women in the service of the Royal Navy…

The Korean war was the single greatest calamity of the period. Residents of Inchon surrender to American troops in 1950

Armageddon averted

9 September 2017 9:00 am

From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…

William Joyce — better known as Lord Haw-Haw: an ideological enthusiast for fascism

The infamous four

22 July 2017 9:00 am

Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy…

Out of hot water

1 April 2017 9:00 am

During and after the second world war the Fourteenth Army in Burma became famous as the Forgotten Army, almost as…

Listening in to the Russians

10 September 2016 9:00 am

There are now enough books about Bletchley Park for it to become part of national mythology, along with the Tudors,…

Robert Nairac: brave to a fault

2 January 2016 9:00 am

Captain Robert Nairac was a Grenadier Guards officer serving in Northern Ireland when on 14 May 1977 he was abducted…

Bletchley Park was decades ahead of Silicon Valley. So what happened?

25 July 2015 9:00 am

Gordon Corera, best known as the security correspondent for BBC News, somehow finds time to write authoritative, well-researched and readable…

Baiting the trap with CHEESE: how we fooled the Germans in the second world war

28 March 2015 9:00 am

Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day…

The gripping story of the failed NKVD officer who fooled the FBI and the CIA

21 February 2015 9:00 am

This is not quite another story about a man who never was. But it is about a man who certainly…

Catherine Parr, whose dangerously reformist ‘Lamentation’ Shardlake must recover, comes over as a sympathetic and attractive figure

The Tudor sleuth who's cracked the secret of suspense

1 November 2014 9:00 am

Some reviewers are slick and quick. Rapid readers, they remember everything, take no notes, quote at will. I’m the plodding…

Why Jonathan Powell thinks we'll have to negotiate with al-Qa’eda

4 October 2014 9:00 am

Jonathan Powell is best known as Tony Blair’s fixer. He was intimately involved with the Northern Ireland peace process, about…