The Cold War

  • The CIA Book Club

    £10.99

    A Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph and Economist

    ‘This book reads like a spy novel’ FINANICAL TIMES

    ‘Entertaining and vivid’ OBSERVER

    ‘Reads like a thriller’ THE SUN

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    The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

  • The Nuclear Age

    £30.00

    Acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy paints an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. From the first artificial splitting of the atom in 1917 and the race to create the first atomic bomb in World War II, through the fraught arms race of the Cold War, to the imperialism, neo-colonial motivation and wars being waged today, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is as pertinent as ever. As he examines the motivations of key players, Plokhy confronts the crucial question of our age: what can we learn from the first nuclear arms race that can help us to stop the new one?

  • The CIA

    £12.99

    As World War II ended, the United States stood as the dominant power on the world stage. In 1947, to support its new global status, it created the CIA to analyse foreign intelligence. But within a few years, the Agency was engaged in other operations: bolstering pro-American governments, overthrowing nationalist leaders, and surveilling anti-imperial dissenters in the US. The Cold War was an obvious reason for this transformation – but not the only one. Intelligence historian Hugh Wilford draws on decades of research to show the Agency as part of a larger picture, the history of Western empire. While young CIA officers imagined themselves as British imperial agents like T.E. Lawrence, successive US presidents used the covert powers of the Agency to hide overseas interventions from postcolonial foreigners and anti-imperial Americans alike.

  • The Stalin Affair

    £12.99

    The true story of the motley group of Allied men and women who worked to manage Stalin’s mercurial, explosive approach to diplomacy during four turbulent years of World War II.

  • The Spy in the Archive

    £25.00

    The compulsively readable new book from The Rest is Classified host Gordon Corera. About how one man – Vasili Mitrokhin – turned first disaffected dissident and then traitor to the KGB, stealing the most secret Soviet archives and smuggling them to the West.

  • Karla’s Choice

    £9.99

    It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West’s spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy. But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley will soon find himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come, and strike at the heart of his greatest enemy.

  • The illegals

    £22.00

    In 2010, two decades after the Cold War, ten Russian spies were arrested in the US following a ten-year FBI operation. Among them were three couples who had lived as Americans for years, and one agent who had nearly forgotten Russian. They had hidden their true identities from their children, neighbours and even their partners. Moscow expert Shaun Walker captures the untold history of Russia’s deep cover spy programme, from the ‘great illegals’ of the 1920s and 1930s to the twenty-first century, when agents maintained their fake identities and loyalties after the fall of the Soviet Union.

  • The CIA book club

    £25.00

    ‘Entertaining and vivid? This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known Cold War moment’ OBSERVER

    The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

  • Fugitives

    £14.99

    From Spain to Syria, the thrilling, untold history of Nazi fugitives turned postwar agents-for America, the Soviets, the Third World, or themselves.

  • Karla’s choice

    £22.00

    It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West’s spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy.But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley will soon find himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come, and strike at the heart of his greatest enemy.

  • The peacock and the sparrow

    £9.99

    Prize winning and critically acclaimed spy fiction from an ex-CIA operations officer.

  • Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans

    £10.99

    Based on a battery of source materials that ranges from newspaper reports to feature films, from declassified Foreign Office documents to private diaries, personal letters and interviews with veterans, ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’ offers telling insights into Britain’s experience of the Second World War and the Cold War, and sheds revelatory light on the development of Britain’s relationship with Europe since 1945.