A step too far
Captain Robert Nairac was a Grenadier Guards officer serving in Northern Ireland when on 14 May 1977 he was abducted…
The end of secrecy
Gordon Corera, best known as the security correspondent for BBC News, somehow finds time to write authoritative, well-researched and readable…
Big Cheese in MI6
Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day…
The great defection deception
This is not quite another story about a man who never was. But it is about a man who certainly…
The burning issue of the age
Some reviewers are slick and quick. Rapid readers, they remember everything, take no notes, quote at will. I’m the plodding…
Dirty dealing
Jonathan Powell is best known as Tony Blair’s fixer. He was intimately involved with the Northern Ireland peace process, about…
The kindness of strangers
It is with a heavy heart that I pick up anything to do with the Holocaust. Not because it’s wearisome…
Goodwood Festival of Speed
You smelt them, it was said of the Mongol hordes, before you heard them, and by the time you heard…
Main currents of history
The clue is in the title: this is not about the blue-grey-green wet stuff that covers 70 per cent of…
Who knows wins
Anyone brought up as I was in a Daily Express household in the 1950s — there were approaching 11 million…
When every captain was a Nelson
‘I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson…His ascendancy over everybody…
A narrow escape
C.J. Sansom is deservedly famous for his Shardlake crime novels, featuring a 16th-century lawyer on the fringes of the court.…
Bookends: The year of living dangerously
Most people who recall 1976 do so for its appallingly hot summer, when parks turned brown and roads melted. Some…
Bookends
I like books with weather and there’s plenty in this one, all bad, which is even better. Set in London…
