Christopher Andrew’s books are usually not intended for the general public but are primarily written for intelligence professionals, scholars of intelligence history, and journalists.
This particular book, however, will also be an eye-opener and a treasure trove for those who are interested in espionage as a literary subject. In his new work, Professor Andrew and his co-author cover a new topic: complex relations between the people of art and literature and secret services. And, as usual, it is beautifully written and contains a great deal of entirely new material that you simply cannot get from any other source.
A vastly entertaining and unique history of the interaction between spying and showbiz, from the Elizabethan age to the Cold War and beyond.
'A treasure trove of human ingenuity' The Times
Written by two experts in their fields, Stars and Spies is the first history of the extraordinary connections between the intelligence services and show business.
We travel back to the golden age of theatre and intelligence in the reign of Elizabeth I. We meet the writers, actors and entertainers drawn into espionage in the Restoration, the Ancien Regime and Civil War America. And we witness the entry of spying…
I must admit I bought this book for purely professional interest because my own new book project deals with women and espionage.
As with all such works, I quote Nadine Akkerman, "the debt owed to those who have already prepared the ground is immense". It is hard to express my gratitude in better words. My time to study it and my expenses were fully justified because the book is very well-researched and well-written and at least for me it contains plenty of absolutely new useful material for my own work.
Indeed, with the exception of Mata Hari (and, er, well, maybe, Anna Chapman) even an intelligence historian, not to mention an ordinary reader, may probably decide that women had no place in the world of espionage. I do not speak of those who are fans of Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow but I have in mind not erotic fiction but serious literature.
Nadine Akkerman’s book is probably the very first study of the role of early modern women spies demonstrating that the allegedly male world of secret agents was (and certainly is) more than merely infiltrated by women.
It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history. If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the turbulent decades of civil strife in Britain can escape the historiographer's gaze, then how many more like her lurk in the archives?
Nadine Akkerman's search for an answer to this question has led to the writing of Invisible Agents, the very first study to analyse…
This book is, unfortunately, little known and I also ordered it quite by chance only having learnt that the author had been a Moscow correspondent for Reuters and also represented some leading British newspapers there for about four decades.
That is, he had lived in Moscow when this vast piece of land, alternatively known as the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, USSR, and Russian Federation, was governed by Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev (I do not mention Chernenko because he was not important and did not last long). It is amazing that a foreigner and besides that a Brit witnessed it all from Stalin’s trials and Beria’s plots to the perestroika and glasnost for which Gorbachev became so well known and respected in the West and hated in his own country.
In my view, it is a wonderfully written book and even for a person who has also lived in Russia for all those years, it is full of revelations, interesting observations, and unique personalities whom John Miller was able to meet in Moscow during his time there.
Thirty-five years ago, John Miller gave a talk to the Great Britain - USSR Association about his experiences in the Soviet Union as a foreign correspondent. His book All Them Cornfields and Ballet in the Evening is the story of some of the people and places he visited over some 50 years of involvement with the USSR - now a vanished world. The title is unashamedly stolen from the film I'm Alright Jack, which appeared in 1957. Fred Kite (played by Peter Sellers) is a communist trade-union leader, who is forever acclaiming the Soviet Union as a workers' paradise. Asked…
This is the first volume of a new history of the KGB planned to be in six volumes covering the period from 1917 to 2027. It is new in every aspect and not only because neither the official history nor an unofficial history of the Soviet/Russian secret police exists in any language. Someone might argue that the eminent British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew has already produced three volumes of the KGB history ‘From Lenin to Gorbachev’ with two Soviet defectors as his co-authors, but this will not be accurate because those were only histories of the KGB’s operations abroad.
