If you have read many of my reviews, you know that one of my primary complaints about a majority of non-fiction books is that they are long magazine articles that the author has padded into a "book" by saying the same thing over and over again. This book is a refreshing change. The author fills...
Fascinating. Non-fiction. The story of Kim Philby, an English spy for the Soviet Union. Recruited along with several of his friends from Cambridge. Spied for the Soviet Union from 1939 until 1963 and then escaped to Moscow where he lived out the remainder of his life. During his spying years...
When I read a review of this in 1998 I immediately put it on my wish list. As a Sherlock Holmes fan how could I not want to read about the man that was possibly the model for Morriarty? (Quick wikipedia link for Worth for those who are impatient.) And so the book sat in my wish list, but didn't g...
In the first terrifying days of World War I, four British soldiers found themselves trapped behind enemy lines on the western front. They were forced to hide in the tiny French village of Villeret, whose inhabitants made the courageous decision to shelter the fugitives until they could pass as Pi...
It took Philby only a few rushed minutes to explain the situation: MI6 had new and damning information, from Golitsyn, and had offered him immunity in exchange for information. He did not tell his KGB handler that he had already confessed; instead, he allowed Petukhov to believe that he was holdi...
The car and its occupants did not seem particularly worthy of attention—the Germans were always rushing around at odd hours—but the noise it was making most certainly was: a strange, high-pitched metallic scream, audible from a distance of half a mile, that died away as the car came to a stop. So...
The politicians were up for sale, the magistrates and the police were corrupt, the poor often had little choice but to steal, while the rich sometimes had little inclination not to, since they tended to get away with it. Seldom has history conspired to assemble, on one small island, such a vivid ...
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the allure of Bond’s lifestyle to a postwar Britain strained by rationing, deprived of glamour and still bruised by the privations of war. Bond is, quite simply, a stylish, fast-shooting, high-living, sexually liberated advertisement for all the things ordina...