The best-selling author of Operation Mincemeat presents a definitive portrait of the notorious 20th-century spy that discusses his rise in MI6, high-profile intelligence friendships and 20-year espionage operation that culminated in his 1963 defection to Moscow. "Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War - while...

"Oleg Gordievsky was a spy like no other. The product of a KGB family and the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Russian eventually saw the lies and terror of the regime for what they were, a realization that turned him irretrievably toward the West. His KGB career took flight in Copenhagen in 1966 and eventually brought him to the highest post in the KGB's London station--but throughout that time he was secretly working for MI6, the...

"In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape....

"Britain's Special Air Service--or SAS--was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat with a remarkable strategic mind. Where his colleagues looked at a map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind Nazi lines and sabotage their airplanes and supplies. Paired with his constitutional...

The official history of Ian Fleming and James Bond by the bestselling author of Operation Mincemeat

'Marvellously entertaining and informative' Spectator

'Thrilling' Sunday Times

'An entertaining mix of history, espionage, biography, and post-war sociology' Literary Review
_____________________

'I am going to...

“A fascinating, provocative, and highly eccentric volume” (The New York Times) exploring the true story of Elisabeth Nietzsche’s maniacal attempt to found a utopian colony in the jungles of Paraguay in the late nineteenth century—from the bestselling author of Prisoners of the Castle.
In 1886, Elisabeth Nietzsche, the bigoted, imperious sister of the famous philosopher, founded a “racially pure”...

In the first days of World War I, four British soldiers found themselves trapped behind enemy lines on the western front. They were forced to hide in the tiny French village of Villeret, whose inhabitants decided to shelter the fugitives until they could pass as Picard peasants. Here is the love affair between Private Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne.

In 1886 Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the famous philosopher, and friend of Richard Wagner, traveled with her husband, Bernhard Forster, and a select group of blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans to the remote Paraguayan wilderness to found an Aryan colony she called Nueva Germania. In Forgotten Fatherland Ben Macintyre tracks down the descendants of this early racial experiment, still living in Nueva Germania and breeding among themselves. Many have...