Sub-titled 'How Britain Played the Greater Game From Afghanistan To Africa', much has been written about espionage, secret agents and MI6 missions abroad, but what of the origins of British Intelligence as we know it today? This is the story of intelligence at the height of the British Empire, and the characters that shaped its narrative. Beaver writes with authority and spritely wit about the men who ensured that Victorian Pax Britannica was intelligence-based and intelligence-led and demonstrates convincingly how its gifted operatives influenced and even created imperial policy. He unveils the men who staffed the War Office's Intelligence Division, and above all looks at their tenacity and imagination. He looks at their shrewd observations and analysis of international events which provided the basis for modern military espionage and changed the landscape of the British Empire from India to South Africa. He focusses on the years between the Crimean War and the formation of MI5 and MI6 at the start of the 20th century and charts the Intelligence Division's course from a misunderstood army unit to an elite body, central to the British military. The book is a rollicking adventure into the minds behind the muscles of the British Army, their successes, sacrifices and expertise in weaving a global net of information. 340pp, paperback, photos.

For more than a millennium, criminals in the British Isles were beheaded, garrotted, hung, drawn and quartered for crimes as varied as serial murder to impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner. Certain forms of execution, such as beheading, were reserved for the nobility, and up to the 18th century decapitated heads were displayed publicly on London Bridge. Hanging became the principal method of punishment at about the same time as the beginning of the movement for the abolition of the death penalty. In 1861 the number of capital crimes was reduced to four, and the last judicial executions took place in 1964 with permanent abolition in 1969. A number of high-profile miscarriages of justice contributed to the abolition, among them the trial of serial strangler John Christie in 1953, during which it emerged that a fellow housemate had been executed a few years earlier for a crime of which Christie was now found guilty. Another controversial case was the hanging of 19-year-old Derek Bentley, a mentally challenged young man whose younger accomplice had fired the lethal shot. Starting in 1900, the author lists all the judicial executions in Britain, totalling 865. Most entries are brief, giving the name, age, crime, date of hanging and name of the hangman, but some celebrated cases are described in detail. These include Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged, who was executed at Holloway in 1955 by Albert Pierrepoint, a member of a dynasty of chief hangmen. Ruth admitted killing her lover when she found him with another woman and made it clear she felt she deserved to die. By contrast, George Joseph Smith, the "brides in the bath" murderer, cold-bloodedly drowned a series of women for their money. 142pp, paperback, photos.

It is the rule of unforeseen circumstances that says that the best intentions can lead to the worst results, and never was this more succinctly played out than when, in attempting to take the moral high ground, in 1908 Great Britain ended its lucrative trade in opium from Imperial India to China. This immediately ushered in a century of organised criminality in which gangs grew spectacularly wealthy on the illegal narcotics trade, something which Gladstone had accurately predicted when arguing against the abolition of the imperial opium trade in Parliament. The world price of opium soared to a new high and a century of lucrative drug smuggling began. The book introduces the reader to a whole new collection of heroes and villains, including US international drug-buster Harry J. Anslinger, Shanghai underworld master criminal Du Yue-sheng, and tough North-West Frontier police chief Lieutenant Colonel Roos-Keppel, nemesis of Afghan criminal gangs. It was the well-established global trade routes of the Empire which made the gangsters' work easy - in a few short years the Empire upon which the sun never set had become the criminal network with the same attribute. Even the greatest symbols of power - the ships of the Royal Navy - were being used to shift drugs between continents, and soon guns too were being smuggled along the trade routes, by people who had no interest in where they ended up. In another twist of irony, having handed this great gift to organised crime Britain then took on the burden of pursuing the purveyors of the evil it had created, with Scotland Yard providing some of the most innovative drugs-busters, many of whom came to a sticky end when they became too successful for the gangsters' liking. 268pp, photos.

A smuggler was 'a wretch who, in defiance of justice and the laws, imports or exports goods as either contraband or without payment of the customs,' according to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. Smuggling, or 'Free Trade', may have peaked in the 17th and 18th centuries but it first began in response to a toll on wine imports by Anglo-Saxon king Aethelred II (966-1016) who needed to pay for holding off Danish invaders. As a result, wine traders used any port or harbour except the toll ports. The book explains how, over the years, women could help unload and carry smuggled contraband as silk, bladders filled with alcohol and even ropes of tobacco could be wound around the legs and body and safely hidden beneath voluminous layers of skirt and petticoats. The cup of tea may be an established part of life today, but the history highlights that Portuguese merchants in the 1500s would smuggle tea into Europe and the fashion of tea drinking was supposedly introduced to England in the 1600s by Portuguese-born Catherine of Braganza when she married King Charles II in 1662. The chapters are dotted with "little known facts" including the detail that when smugglers were arrested during the 18th century, they received the sympathy of local magistrates reliant on receiving goods and, on one occasion, the magistrate dismissed the charge and ordered the arresting officer to be flogged for his impertinence instead. The facts are often amusing, from the story of a Dorset smuggler who taunted the revenue men by dropping his breeches and mooning them, to Joss Snelling who was still smuggling in his nineties and was presented to Queen Victoria. Photographs of routes which smugglers travelled are also included, a shot of a West Country lane that was typical of a hidden highway, Mermaid Street in Rye and graveyards and old ruins. Paperback, black and white images, 170pp.

The body of Julia Wallace was found in her Liverpool home on one terrible night in January 1933, her head crushed by violent blows, the identity of her killer a mystery. Her husband William was accused, tried and convicted and sentenced to hang for murder, but he was then acquitted in a sensational appeal court judgement. Yet the police refused to reopen their investigation. So who did kill Julia? When Roger Wilkes started researching a dramatised radio documentary for Liverpool's Radio City, he uncovered new evidence which suggested a disturbing story ? a crucial witness ignored by the police, and even a suggestion of a deliberate cover-up. Finally, Wilkes provides compelling evidence as to the identity of the real killer. With chronology of events, chapters include A Conspiracy of Silence, The Wallace Diaries, Wallace's First Statement to the Police and Comments by Raymond Chandler who once said: 'The Wallace case is unbeatable, it will always be unbeatable.' P. D. James said of this book: 'It is a formidable, indeed a damning indictment, and Wilkes presents the result of his detective work with journalistic panache.' Deep in psychology and with 25 rare archive photos. 338pp, paperback.

Few people nowadays know very much about the Gestapo's 'Black Book' and its implications. Even fewer know of more than a dozen of the famous English names that it included. Anonymous and with no publisher and stamped GEHEIM! (SECRET!), it was compiled in German by the Gestapo and their informants at some time between 1936-7 and July 1940, in readiness for a German invasion of Britain. This is the first serious attempt to identify, classify and analyse a significant sample of the hundreds of anti-Nazi men and women, both British-born and refugee, targeted by the Nazi Secret Police in the Black Book. Deliberately included are those Jewish refugees who, stripped of their German or Austrian citizenship, would become 'naturalised' British and who comprise the majority of those on the List. On the list were Leonhard (sic) and Virginia Woolf. Why did they target a modern novelist? Even those who urged the cessation of the bombing of German civilians and the feeding of starving Germans after the war and supported a new, revived and democratic Germany were included, for example Arthur Ponsonby, Vera Brittain, Bishop Bell, and Victor Gollancz. There is an A-Z listing of some 2,619 names of men and women, mostly with their addresses, to be arrested and interned in camps or placed under house arrest at once, if not executed. Secondly, the more or less A-Z listing of the names and addresses of nearly 400 British Behoerden Firmen and Vereini-Gungen (institutions, businesses, organisations and associations) - all of which were to be proscribed, their papers seized, and their mostly British-born leaders arrested. The second part of the book is the Gestapo's Informationsheft GB, compiled May to July 1940 as an introductory handbook on Britain for the occupation troops, including the SS, and mentioning any additional leading individuals who would require surveillance and probable arrest. The Boy Scouts movement was regarded as a powerful medium of English cultural propaganda and an excellent source for the British Secret Service and was led by Lord Baden-Powell who had himself been a spy in WW1 against Germany. The Fabian Society, Quakers, the New Burlington Gallery, the British Museum and National Gallery, members of the Labour Party, allegedly now in the hands of former public schoolboys, a section on 'Radio' and broadcasting, the Informationsheft describes the Church of England with a membership calculated at 2.3 million as a powerful factor in the exercise of British imperialism, and trade unions said to be 'Marxist' included bakers to cigar makers. It noted that the Freemasons had penetrated all the highest and middle ranks of British society. Sybil Oldfield sheds light on the Gestapo world view and movingly reveals a network of truly exemplary Britons - mavericks, moral visionaries and unsung heroes, chemists, art historians and musicologists, and spies. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? 437pp, 32 photos.

In 1724 'A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates' went on sale in Charles Rivington's shop near St Paul's Cathedral and was an immediate success. By 1726 it had been expanded to a two-volume edition, and in 1734 formed part of an extensive volume that now included the outrageous exploits of highwaymen, street robbers and other scoundrels. The volume includes such famous characters as Edward Teach, Blackbeard, and John Rackam, Calico Jack, who had two female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read disguised among his crew. Some of the other 25 famous outlaws are William Kidd, Bartholomew Roberts, Henry Morgan, Captain Avery, Major Stede Bonnet, Captain Charles Vane, Captain John Rackam, and John Gow. Of the most famous, the Scotsman William Kidd was hanged (twice because the first time the rope snapped) in London in May 1701, and his body then gibbeted at Tilbury Point on the Thames. Henry Avery probably died in poverty in Barnstaple in 1714, his extraordinary ill-gotten wealth having run through his fingers like sand. Blackbeard, the notorious Englishman Edward Teach, was killed in battle with the Royal Navy in November 1718. That year Royal Navy Captain Woodes Rogers defeated an entire colony of pirates in the Bahamas and accepted the surrender of 2000 men. Calico Jack and ten of his crew were hanged in Jamaica in November 1720. An enormous number of other pirates were also captured and executed, estimates ranging from 400-600 between 1716 and 1726. The curse of piracy had been lifted by legal changes and better maritime policing. Blending fact and fiction, many of the details have been verified by historical research and others have endured for centuries to influence the popular image of pirates in literature, film and television. These are tales that cross the Atlantic in both directions, to the new worlds of the west and the coasts of Africa. 396pp, lovely woodcut illus.

The Cold War spy Kim Philby lied and tricked his way through life and Hanning's masterful research lays bare the extraordinary hypocrisy in a tale as gripping as any thriller. It tells the extraordinary story of how Eleanor, a cultured American living in the espionage hotspot of 1950s Beirut, fell in love with the kindest of men. Unknown to her that man, Kim Philby, was under suspicion by the British and US intelligence services of having secretly signed up to help the Russians fight fascism in the 1930s, and of remaining in their pay at the height of the Cold War. Despite his mysterious past, Eleanor adored and married Philby, but the strength of their love was challenged as the net steadily closed in on him. His story may be familiar, but this angle breaks remarkable new ground and is an eye-opening tale of friendship, politics, love and loyalty which surpasses the best spy fiction and is a cautionary tale about the true costs of male privilege on the higher echelons of the British establishment. 408pp, paperback with 16 pages of photos and useful timeline. In the words of David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, 'The scale of Philby's betrayal is barely calculable to anyone who has not been in the business. In Eastern Europe alone, dozens and perhaps hundreds of British agents were imprisoned, tortured and shot.' Map. Paperback, 2022.

Sub-titled 'The History of Espionage and the Secret World', Colonel John Hughes-Wilson charts the history of intelligence from its biblical origins to the onset of the surveillance state in the digital age, and lifts the veil of secrecy of this clandestine and murky world. He examines the dangerous uncertainties of spies and human intelligence, how the Cold War became an electronic intelligence war, the technical revolution that began with the first use of reconnaissance photography in WW1, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, how signals intelligence gave America one of its greatest victories, how Wikileaks really happened, and whether 9/11 could have been avoided if America?s post-Cold War intelligence agencies had adapted to the new world of international terrorism. An impressive dossier of little-known informers, renegades and rogues who have caused unknown trouble to their respective governments, the author, one of Britain's leading commentators and contemporary military historians, writes with passion and authority. Chapters also touch on Cambridge's famous five, satellites, Vietnam and the Tet Offensive, Yom Kippur, Barbarossa and Stalin, the USS Pueblo and more. 510pp, paperback with diagrams.

'Absorbing, terrifying, beautiful and appalling. I loved it... Unforgettable.' - Ruth Rendell. 15 years after their divorce, Susan Morrow receives a strange gift from her ex-husband - a manuscript that tells the story of a terrible crime, of an ambush on the highway, of a secluded cabin in the woods. It is a chilling tale of death and corruption, written by the man she once loved. Why after so long has he sent her a disturbing and personal message? This book is a lost masterpiece of American literature, a dazzling and multi-layered novel of marriage, literature, fear and revenge written by the New York novelist and academic who died in 2003 at the age of 80. A very classy reprint with unusual cut-out jacket, 374pp in paperback.