The Cold War

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  • Polar War

    £11.99

    Russian spies. Sabotaged pipelines. Undersea communications severed in the dead of night. Tensions are building at the top of the world and the Arctic – the fastest-warming place on Earth – stands at the crossroads of geopolitical ambition and environmental catastrophe. As thawing ice opens up new trade routes, untapped natural resources and long-frozen biological weapons, award-winning commentator Kenneth R. Rosen draws on first-hand reportage and testimony to document the race to control this strategically crucial territory. Can America, which since the 1990s has lagged behind on infrastructure, reimpose its might against the superior technology and strategic engagement of Russia and China? Above the Arctic Circle, the world’s superpowers stand on the brink of a new cold war – and every day it grows hotter.

  • The Taper Man

    £22.00

    It is 1965, and the Cold War has never been colder. The Circus – the secret centre of British intelligence – has one prize asset left in Moscow: a senior Red Army officer with access to the enemy’s deepest secrets. But when a British agent is shot in Helsinki, George Smiley uncovers a Soviet operation that imperils this irreplaceable source. The trail leads Smiley not to Berlin or Vienna, but Los Angeles – the most foreign place he has ever known. There, in the murky heart of US intelligence, a Communist sleeper agent – a ‘Taper Man’ – is poised to expose Britain’s operative in Moscow. To save him, Smiley must navigate an America riven with political tension, all while his spy in Leningrad, Roy Bland, risks everything in pursuit of a Russian defector who holds the final piece of the puzzle.

  • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

    £20.00

    Alec Leamas is tired. It’s the 1960s, he’s been out in the cold for years, spying in the shadow of the Berlin Wall for his British masters. He has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants to bring him in at last – but only after one final assignment. He must travel deep into the heart of Communist Germany and betray his country, a job that he will do with his usual cynical professionalism. But when George Smiley tries to help a young woman Leamas has befriended, Leamas’s mission may prove to be the worst thing he could ever have done. In le Carré’s breakthrough work of 1963, the spy story is reborn as a gritty and terrible tale of men who are caught up in politics beyond their imagining.

  • Who Paid the Piper?

    £14.99

    During the Cold War, the battle for ideological and economic supremacy was fought on every front. At the heart of the US’s campaign to inoculate the world against Communism and advance its own liberal democratic ideals was the CIA’s Congress of Cultural Freedom – an organisation that was as clandestine as it was powerful. Drawing on declassified documents and exclusive interviews, this book exposes the astonishing secret campaign to deploy some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West (including Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock) as instruments – whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not – of America’s secret service. One of the great stories of intellectual and artistic corruption by power, this work is a classic of investigative history and a landmark portrait of a period when politics and culture became dangerously intertwined.

  • War or Peace?

    £22.00

    Are America and China destined for war?

  • Redwood

    £25.00

    The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah’s fledgling Islamist regime. If they do so, one response from America – unknown to the public – would be to use nuclear weapons. ‘Redwood’ is the story of how at the height of the Cold War, one mysterious double agent, whose intelligence reached the highest levels of British and American governments, cracked open the KGB, revealed the Kremlin’s secret plot and prevented Armageddon.’Redwood’ was the MI6 codename for this unsung, hitherto unknown hero of the Cold War, a highly-trained six-foot-four Russian intelligence officer who chose to expose the KGB’s deepest secrets, compelled to swap sides by a shaming secret of his own. Facing exposure, with both the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and his own KGB colleagues closing in, he demanded that MI6 try to smuggle him out of Iran in a high-stakes escape pla

  • Cold Sunset

    £20.00

    Cold War Moscow is a place smouldering with secrets. Gabriel Dax has been tasked with delivering a mysterious Blanco drawing to celebrated defector Kit Caldwell. But Caldwell is convinced the KGB suspects him of treachery, and he wants out now. When Gabriel is ordered by his enigmatic handler Faith Green to help, he is pulled into a web of shifting loyalties and dangerous escape plans. As tensions rise and trust fractures, he is forced to confront the fine line between devotion and deception.

  • The Defector

    £10.99

    ‘The Defector’ is the untold account of how, in 1971, the defection of a KGB saboteur in London led to the expulsion of more than a hundred Soviet ‘diplomats’ from the UK. Drawing on newly declassified intelligence documents and dozens of interviews with spymasters, the book tells a startling story of a Soviet mission to plant fake Kremlin agents within British and American intelligence services, the paranoia that ensued, and how the actions of a genuine turncoat, the former KGB officer Oleg Lyalin, and the secrets he revealed resulted to one of the most dramatic and pivotal moments in the Cold War.

  • The Spy in the Archive

    £10.99

    LONGLISTED for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2026

    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.

  • Stalin’s Apostles

    £25.00

    Antonia Senior has done that rare thing, written an account of the Cambridge Five with an historian’s fidelity to fact and a novelist’s eye for character. Her meticulous research and elegant writing bring to life the story of class-conscious Englishmen whose youthful embrace of Communism led to the 20th century’s most audacious spy network. It’s a spellbinding tale of espionage, friendship, and betrayal.

  • The Illegals

    £11.99

    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

    £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

    ————————————

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

  • Operation Paperclip

    £12.99

    In the chaos following WWII, many of Germany’s remaining resources were divvied up among allied forces. Some of the greatest spoils were the Third Reich’s scientific minds. The United States secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis’ forbidden knowledge outweighed their crimes, and the government formed a covert organization called Operation Paperclip to allow them to work without the knowledge of the American public. In this book, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into one of the most complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secrets of the 20th century.

  • 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.

  • Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

    £11.99

    On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket. The man was a spy. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more to damage the KGB. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia. So began one of the boldest and most extraordinary episodes in the history of spying. Ben Macintyre reveals a tale of espionage, betrayal and raw courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever.

  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

    £12.99

    George Smiley, who is a troubled man of infinite compassion, is also a single-mindedly ruthless adversary as a spy. The scene which he enters is a Cold War landscape of moles and lamplighters, scalp-hunters and pavement artists, where men are turned, burned or bought for stock. Smiley’s mission is to catch a Moscow Centre mole burrowed thirty years deep into the Circus itself.