Spying
The reluctant spy: The Predicament, by William Boyd, reviewed
Sucked further into the quicksand of 1960s espionage, Gabriel Dax is sent to Guatemala, and then on to West Berlin, where he uncovers a plot to assassinate President Kennedy
The questions the government must answer over the China spying case
Exactly a year ago, this magazine warned that ministers were showing a dangerous naivety towards China. We revealed that the…
Here be dragons: the truth about Chinese espionage
On 3 July a Chinese man, Xu Zewei, was arrested in Milan to face extradition on nine charges relating to…
Did Jonathan Powell torpedo the China espionage trial?
The antics of Keir Starmer and his top security adviser over the collapsed China espionage case bring to mind the…
Is the British Council really a ‘nest of espionage’?
I worked for nearly a decade at the British Council in East Asia. Every day, under the guise of teaching…
Could anyone be trusted in Tudor and Stuart England?
An investigation of the codes, disguises and invisible inks used by plotters and spymasters captures the paranoia of an age when secret messages could be hidden anywhere
The Xi files: how China spies
Most states spy. In principle there’s nothing to stop them. But China’s demand for intelligence on the rest of the…
Dirty rotten tricks
In 2010, Mark Kennedy, a tattooed social justice warrior, was exposed as an undercover police officer. In this guise he…
Should locals be allowed to work at British embassies?
It is just short of 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and suddenly there comes a reminder…
We need to act now to block Britain’s social credit system
I have to admit that I didn’t quite get it right when, 12 days ago, I wrote: ‘There is a…
Matt Hancock isn’t the only politician who is clueless about cyber security
It is widely acknowledged that Britain has some of the world’s finest cyber capabilities. GCHQ is a global leader in…
Why is Macron feigning outrage at the Danish spying scandal?
The feigned outrage in Berlin – but mostly in Paris – at the USA’s proxy use of Denmark’s intelligence services…
How Denmark helped America spy on Sweden
A large, investigative collaboration between Scandinavian public service outlets and European newspapers such as Le Monde and Süddeutsche Zeitung has…
Why Roy Cohn is not one of the world’s most evil men
New York The Roy Cohn documentary Bully. Coward. Victim: the Story of Roy Cohn was successfully screened at the…
After Huawei, can we trust Chinese tech?
The world is a better place for China’s emergence from behind the bamboo curtain where it hid for half a…
The history of Britain’s secret war on Napoleon is astonishing, inspiring and disturbing
Laws and sausages, we know, are better not seen in the making; and neither are ‘black ops’. Waterloo may have…
Kate Atkinson’s new novel Transcription asks us how carefully we are paying attention
Transcription, Kate Atkinson’s 11th novel, sees her returning to the detective fiction she honed in her series about Jackson Brodie,…
Be a spy like me, Charlotte Bingham’s father advises
That there’s a direct correlation between sex and spying is probably Ian Fleming’s fault. Hard to think of Bond without…
The prying game
One of the marks of a good Home Secretary is a healthy wariness of those in authority who come begging…
Through the eyes of spies
Spying is a branch of philosophy, although you would never guess it from that expression on Daniel Craig’s face. Its…
Old school ties
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Julian Mitchell about the painful roots of his hit play Another Country
