Timothy Phillips has written a gripping account of the secret war between the British intelligence services and the Bolsheviks during the 1920s. Based largely on documents he unearthed in the National Archives, this is a…
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Was Michael Foot, leader of the British Labour Party, a Soviet agent? Was Jack Jones, head of the country’s largest trade union, one as well? According to KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, they both were. (Foot’s…
I read this book during the same week that I saw a theatrical adaptation of Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague. Both works are concerned with epidemics, but there the similarity ends. While the Camus novel…
You know how you go to see a movie and all the best parts were already in the preview? That’s a bit like what happened to Bob Woodward’s 360 page book about the Trump White…
John Hersey’s account of the lives of six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was first published just a year after the events. Despite the passage of more than seventy years, the work endures,…
Roy Peter Clark has been teaching writing to journalists and others (including schoolchildren) for several decades — and now he has taught me. I’ve read a number of writing books over the years and this…
In the near future, a populist demagogue comes to power in America and rolls back decades of progress on women’s rights. In the end, women are forced to wear bracelets which limit the number of…
This is the story of Casablanca — where the story came from, how the film was made, and its “afterlife” right up until a Facebook post by Elizabeth Warren on a recent New Year’s Eve,…
M.R. Carey has done it again. The Girl With All the Gifts was a terrific example of post-apocalyptic zombie fiction and this book is (mostly) the prequel. The problem with prequels is that you know…
To be clear, this is not a book about Martians, or even girls. The central character is a woman in her late thirties, Jean Beckett, a writer who lives in today’s London. She is writing…