Espionage

All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil and Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration bring Tudor and Stuart espionage in from the cold.

In the era of the early modern ‘secret state’, two notorious brothers set up an elaborate intelligence network, managing a vast array of spies and informers watchful for Jacobite plots against Britain.

Mystery surrounds George McMahon who, having tried to assassinate Edward VIII, outed himself as an agent of a ‘foreign power’. Does the discovery of new Italian documents solve the puzzle or obscure it further?

Switzerland was a hub for China’s spy networks in the Cold War. 

During the Franco-Prussian War a British wine merchant was imprisoned in Cologne, accused of being a spy. The public clamoured for the government to secure his release, but wartime diplomacy was not so straightforward. 

A history of the dirty business of wiretapping.

The 1930s spy ring who informed on technological advances in the defence industries.

It is often claimed that press censorship came to an end in England at the close of the 17th century. But it persisted, thanks to an unsavoury network of government spies.

The Happy Traitor: Spies, Lies and Exile in Russia. The Extraordinary Story of George Blake unpicks the motives and damage inflicted by the double agent.