Status Updates From The Secret World: A History...

Never before heard an analysis of 9/11 from an intelligence perspective before. Andrew is pretty scathing of US interdepartmental rivalry and hubris here.

Every time I read about the Germans shipping Lenin to Russia and funding the extreme Bolsheviks during WWI I'm freshly horrified but after reading Figes' A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY a couple of years back on the actual effects of the Russian Revolution...it's about ten times worse

Lots of very interesting stuff in here. Might be the best book I've read so far on the topic of espionage, signals and human intelligence, cryptography and so on. It is somewhat fascinating how some nations made these things priorities (UK) and others (e.g. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan) not, mostly to their detriment.

Ah yes, and here we are at the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna, the only event in European history of which every description resembles bad erotica for monarchists

ok but I just feel that more people should know about Charles II sending hit squads around Europe to hunt down everyone who came within sniffing distance of his rotten father's death warrant