Formerly Chief Historian of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Senior Editor of the FCO’s official history of postwar foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas, 1995-2005. She was a Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 2002-03 and formerly Assistant Editor of Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939.
‘The sentence was such that it almost became a question of honour to challenge it . . . like a POW, I had a duty to escape.’[1] ‘Double Agent breaks out of jail’ On 11 November 2016, George Blake, the …
The UK and the US shared common strategic interests in the region, but their analyses and policies were not identical and there were important differences in their tactical and diplomatic approaches’. (Chilcot Report on the Iraq enquiry, vol. I, p. …
It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death. Mystery of the missing frogman Sixty years ago today, on 9 May 1956 the Prime Minister, Sir …
No one who has served in Moscow can ever be quite the same person again . . . Those who have had this experience may be pardoned if they think that, among themselves, they can speak a language and carry …
In the early hours of Tuesday, 12 October 1915, Edith Cavell, a British nurse who had been working in Belgium, was executed by the Germans after being found guilty of helping over 200 Allied servicemen escape to England. At her …
The historian John Ehrman, who wrote an account of the atomic bomb and British policy based on privileged access to government records, wrote in 1953 that there were five questions that needed to be asked about the dropping of atomic …
The Yalta Myth Between 4 and 11 February 1945, while the Second World War still raged both in Europe and in the Far East, the ‘Big Three’—Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill—met at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, supported by large …
‘The most powerful government ever to fall as a result of American covert action was the administration of Richard Nixon’ Christopher Andrew, For The President’s Eyes Only
"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies" - Churchill to Stalin at the Teheran Conference, November 1943
How the West was won 65 years ago today the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in the State Department auditorium in Washington. An organisation was born—NATO—that remains a cornerstone of Western defence up to the present day. In 1949 there …