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‘The Soviets would not last two days without the activities of the Cheka, but with the Cheka, the Soviet State was safe’: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Defending the Revolution Before the October Revolution in 1917 that put the Bolsheviks in power …
...Exchequer, while giving Callaghan the Home Office rather than letting him cause trouble on the back benches while, as Richard Crossman put it, ‘intriguing with the City’. ‘Devaluation was something...
...between 1948 and 1950, the US channelled $12 billion into the European Recovery Programme. Britain received the lion’s share of $2.7 billion. The US offer and Soviet response set the...
...on India, against a backdrop of inter-communal rioting, following the announcement in February that Britain would transfer power to an Indian government no later than June 1948. Problems remained in...
75 years ago today, on 15 February 1942, British forces surrendered the ‘impregnable fortress’ of Singapore to the Japanese army. Defeat had come swiftly after the landing of Japanese forces in northern Malaya and southern Thailand on 8 December 1941. …
...and Jordan, a show of force intended to deter Nasser from becoming closer to Moscow. Meanwhile, the UK Government under Harold Macmillan was preoccupied with unsuccessful efforts to promote a...
...DIOMID An officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) who had been captured by North Korean soldiers in 1950, Blake returned from captivity to work for Soviet as...
‘In order to be a good footballer, you must run swiftly and pass the ball accurately’. Wise words indeed – especially when one considers that they were uttered not by Jose Mourinho or Arsene Wenger, but by Kim Il Sung, …
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. …
...Berlin, built by Western intelligence to listen in to Soviet landlines. In fact, plans for the tunnel had been betrayed by SIS officer George Blake to Soviet intelligence even before...
