94 Books Like Churchill's Most Secret 001

My line of work has only enhanced my fascination with spies and spying. Espionage was on the periphery of my world and I was privy, on occasion, to snippets of information that shed light on certain events. Reading this book was like being privy to a host of secrets, many during my own era. How fascinating to be taken through the history of espionage from biblical times until today. The author reveals missing pieces to many significant moments in history, where monumental decisions were made based on information bought and sold, died for, killed for, stolen, or extracted by torture or coercion. Equally fascinating is how so much of that information was misinterpreted, denied, ignored, inflated, or simply misplaced. Great battles were won and lost, kingdoms toppled, fortunes spent and made, often based on a single snippet of information.

I read this book when I was 16 years old. It was my first military history book and I could not put it down. Up until then I had only read military fiction: War and Peace, Ben Hur – the bigger the books the better. What captivated me most about Fuller's 2 volumes was the battles he chose to describe, starting with Salamis in 480BC, had the outcomes been different the course of world history would have changed significantly. The world in which we live in today would not be the same. This only served to intensify my interest in the detailed descriptions and at the end of each battle I'd try and imagine how history might have been impacted had the outcomes been reversed. 

This is the remarkable, true story about an upper-class English woman, Susan Travers, who was chauffeur to French General Pierre Koenig during his North Africa campaign leading the Free French Foreign Legion while attached to the British 8th Army. Koenig became famous for holding out against German General Erwin Rommel at the battle of Bir Hakiem. Susan chose to remain at Bir Hakiem when all other women had been evacuated. At the height of the battle, running out of ammunition, Koenig ordered the evacuation and she drove him through machine-gun fire and a minefield, spearheading the hair-raising escape for the 3,000 soldiers. Susan was my friend and I was the first person to whom she revealed her secret love affair with Koenig, the basis of this book.

My first encounter with Israeli soldiers was in Ramallah during the second intifada. I was alone on the road late one night after curfew when a dozen Israeli soldiers, sons of Russian immigrants, dragged me from my vehicle and put a pistol to my head in a mock execution for their entertainment. My impression of Israeli soldiers was never great after that. Years later I met Miko Peled after reading his book about his time in the Israeli defence force and his relationship with his father, a highly decorated Israeli general who turned from hawk to dove in search of peace and reconciliation with the Palestinians. Miko took up the same struggle after his father's death. We have so far, without success, tried to make a movie of that family struggle.

Many Americans who follow geopolitics, the military, or our nation’s involvement in the Global War on Terror know that Private Military Contractors (PMCs) have become a way in which much of these covert and clandestine wars are fought. Even those who know that PMCs exist don’t know much about the types of missions they do, the types of people who staff these outfits, and the places that they’ve been in modern military history.

Zero Footprint chronicles the exploits of one British citizen on his path from a member of the heralded British Tier 1 unit The Special Air Service (SAS). The book follows his life from what he thought was a career-ending injury that led to his being on the frontlines of every major engagement in the clandestine Global War on Terror. This guy was even in Benghazi the night of the famed “13 hours” attack, and this book gives… show more.

Philip Collins was a speechwriter in Tony Blair’s New Labour government in the UK, and in this book he looks at 25 great speeches through history and picks them apart to show what they were trying to do and how they did it.

It’s very approachable, and full of insider knowledge, anecdotal nuggets, and a craftsman’s insight into speechwriting tricks – as well as mounting a firm and impassioned case for the importance of rhetoric to democracy itself. The jokes are good, too. “Barack Obama may be the best male speaker in living memory,” Collins writes, “and the second-best speaker in his own family.” 

Tom English has produced a series of oral histories (latterly with Peter Burns) which any fan would be advised to read.

The Grudge tells the story of Scotland v England 1990, a game for the Five Nations title that stood for so much more: politics, nationalism, class warfare. It’s a glorious re-telling of an epic game, an upset Scotland win. But I love it for its portrayal of respect between players, of warriors bound by the violent game they play, of friendships across the lines of battle.

Brian Moore emerges a hero: the fearsome “Pitbull” of the England pack, yet a man who fronted up and went drinking with Scots after a crushing defeat. That, to me, is the true spirit of rugby, and the brotherhood it inspires.

I loved this book because I was able to find out more about this lynchpin of the indie music World of the 80s and 90s that I grew up in. Primal Scream was responsible for some iconic tunes, and learning more about Bobby was insightful and entertaining. I discovered so much that I didn’t know about the band’s musical journey and Bobby's influences.

I love finding new authors! Which is why I’m recommending another debut novel—this time from Marion Todd. It won the Bloody Scotland Scottish Crime Debut Novel of the Year 2020. Since then she has published (at the time of writing) a further 4 novels in her series about detective inspector Clare Mackay. I wish I could write that fast! Her serial killer haunts St Andrews, Scotland by luring victims to a stretch of road and then running them over—simple but effective. It can be difficult to write a pacey thriller and develop interesting characters at the same time but Todd manages this admirably. As soon as I finished this novel, I went straight on to the second in the series which is equally as good and I look forward to reading the rest.

Ludington’s book is exciting because it disproves pervasive ideas about wine consumption. One of the big assumptions in the history of commodities is that middle-class people want to imitate elites, and that taste trickles down the social ladder.

Ludington shows that the opposite was true 250 years ago in England and Scotland: aristocrats started changing their wine-buying habits to appear more sympathetic to the middling sort. This trickle-up is an eighteenth-century equivalent of affluent hipsters drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon or fashionistas buying $400 jeans.

I’m the type of reader who finishes each sentence thinking yeah, but how do we know that?, so I find Ludington’s generous footnotes and detailed cellar inventories to be deeply satisfying. This is not an easy read, but it’s a thoroughly enriching one.