The circus provides perfect cover for espionage
As he flew his plane between circus acts across Germany in the 1930s, Cyril Bertram Mills gained vital aerial intelligence about the Nazis’ rearmament programme
Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies, remains an enigma
‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamt up,’ the former naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming once said.…
The sheer tedium of life at Colditz
Given the prisoners’ histories, it’s not surprising there were so many attempted breakouts from Colditz, says Clare Mulley
The great betrayal of Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel Rosenberg was an exceptional woman. Born with a painful curvature of the spine to a poor family of Jewish…
The defiance of the ‘ghetto girls’ who resisted the Nazis
‘Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers,’ ran a New York headline in late 1942. That autumn, the Nazi…
Out-scooping the men: six women reporters of the second world war
Two war correspondents were hitching a lift towards Paris in August 1944 when a sudden wave of German bombers forced…
Sleeping with the enemy: the wartime story of ‘La Chatte’
The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real…
Monuments to the second world war are looking increasingly dodgy
Most monuments are literally set in stone — or cast in bronze to better survive the weather. Being enduring, they…
Female partisans played a vital role in fighting fascism in Italy — but it was a thankless task
‘I am a woman,’ Ada Gobetti wrote in a clandestine Piedmont newsletter in 1943: An insignificant little woman, who has…
How Britain conned the US into entering the war
In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more…
The Lady with the Limp: homage to the one-legged Virginia Hall, SOE’s ‘most dangerous’ agent
‘This seems to be in your rough area. I mean, it contains wooden legs and everything…’ my commissioning editor at…
Anita Leslie: sparkling socialite with the Croix de Guerre
Anita Leslie knew how to tell a story. Arranging to sit for a portrait six months before she died, she…
The CIA, the Vietnam deserters and the aptly named Operation Chaos
‘Keep my name out of it’, was the fairly standard reply when Matthew Sweet started researching the story of the…
Carve their names with pride
‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage…
Carve their names with pride
‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage…
Licence to kill
As I read the last chapter of this book, news broke that the Russian ambassador to Ankara, Andrey Karlov, had…
What did you do in the last war, Maman?
‘La France,’ as everyone knows, is female. Perhaps this is due to gendered assumptions about the beauty, cuisine and couture…
The house that Alfred built
This is a book about boundaries — and relationships. At its heart is the eponymous house by the lake, which…
Mission near impossible
Operation Thunderbolt was, Saul David contends in this gripping book, ‘the most audacious special forces operation in history’. In June…
The beginning of the end
Both German and Allied troops could be accused of war crimes in the struggle for the Ardennes. It’s a tragic and gruesome history, involving heavy casualties — but flashes of black humour make it bearable, says Clare Mulley
A passion for men and intrigue
Moura Budberg (1892–1974) had an extraordinary life. She was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, and as a young…
Resistance and reprisal
Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Vercors, perhaps the most famous stand of the French Resistance…
She Landed by Moonlight, by Carole Seymour-Jones - review
The subtitle of Carole Seymour-Jones’s quietly moving biography of the brilliant SOE agent Pearl Witherington is ‘the real Charlotte Gray’.…
