The death of weapons expert and UN inspector Dr David Kelly in the summer of 2003 is one of the Iraq War's most enduring mysteries. While the case was officially ruled a suicide, this conclusion was reached by an informal government inquiry which the Blair government used to replace the ...
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One of the growing markets in spy fiction is pop culture aimed at teenagers or 'young adults'. The CHERUB series by Robert Muchamore depicts a junior wing of MI6, with the first novel in the series – The Recruit – depicting the recruitment, training and first mission of our protagonist, ...
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I recently joined Robbie Martin of Media Roots to discussion the Salisbury poisoning, the Skripals, the Syrian airstrikes and the general state of politics and Russophobia.  We covered many of the reasons to be sceptical of the official story about the poisoning of the Skripals, how this relates to the ...
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On March 4th Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in the sleepy British city of Salisbury, by forces currently unknown. The British government immediately blamed Russian intelligence, leading to weeks of accusations and counter-accusations, diplomatic expulsions and lots of conspiracy theories about who really did this, and why ...
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Spy is a 2004 BBC gameshow where ordinary members of the public are trained and tested by real life ex-spooks and ultimately some are eliminated until there’s a winner. Spies is a 2017 Channel 4 gameshow where ordinary members of the public are trained and tested by real life ex-spooks ...
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On this month's subscriber-only podcast I talk about my political and personal motives for doing this sort of work as well some of my thoughts on strategies for tackling political problems. I discuss the history of anarchism - both intellectual and terroristic - and how I see my work fitting ...
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In our review of the final season of the original House of Cards, Pearse and I discuss whether Urquhart is a psychopath, or someone so brutalised by the military and ruling class life that he is indistinguishable from one. We look at The Final Cut's depiction of British foreign policy ...
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Arthur Ransome was a well-known children’s author, best known for his series of adventure books beginning with Swallows and Amazons. He was also close friends with the Bolshevik leadership and married Trotsky’s secretary. Meanwhile, he was spying for British intelligence, and being spied on by British intelligence as a suspected ...
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