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For Perspective

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For The Emigre

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For The Critic

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For Geographical

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For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, May 9 1907
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At 45% of the population, white Christians are a shrinking demographic in America.

Hermal eggings are so leek.

No sensitive person would choose to be the historian of the Irish asylums in the first part of the last century.

Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse.

Carol Drinkwater has just enjoyed a nice glass of Rioja.

WG Grace achieved 83 ducks in his first-class career. One man alone – Shaw (A.) – clean bowled him 20 times, and six times Grace hit his own wickets.

Smak is full of natural goodness.

Poet Laureate Robert Southey was once elected to parliament without his knowledge, while on holiday.

During the Russian Revolution, some people named their daughters ‘Terrora’.

Satire and humour are more common among royalists.

A trifle can do you a lot of harm.

Goldfish pheromones were discovered by accident.

Only in the English language is there the phrase ‘too clever by half’.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Wednesday, April 10 1907
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All the best people are born in October.

In Moldova (and Czechoslovakia), ‘carp’ is spelled ‘crap’.

In 1492 Native Americans discovered Columbus lost at sea.

Exultant language is reserved for the mountains.

Ye cannae shove yer granny off the bus.

You can get syphilis through wooden spoons.

Real men wear real clothes.

Termite baiting is currently in progress.

Max Hastings is the author of 27 books, most about conflict.

Not all of Mozart’s paintings were perfect.

Scotland have been knocked out of the Rugby World Cup.

One of the known properties of honey is that it drips.

Some Russian villages purposely elect the village idiot.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Tuesday, September 25 1906
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The Earl of Oxford did not write Fleabag.

Hull is other people.

Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci chose to stick the with most ridiculous crap name that they could think of.

Failure to yield causes one in five accidents in Ohio.

Justin Trudeau performs yoga.

The Incredible Hulk is better than Cúchulainn.

There are 67 million invented names on Facebook.

Silent and discreet masseuses do not exist in Russia.

Starfish taste very bitter.

The Rifle Volunteers are always ready – but not yet wanted.

The Space Bowl is again closed due to maintenance.

Leonardo da Vinci has a violin made from a horse’s skull, with silver on.

There seems no middle ground with borscht.

Nowadays, one might think, few would even know that. But that’s where Christopher Andrew – Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, and late President of Corpus Christi, Cambridge (Marlowe’s old haunt) – begins his compendious survey, with the story of the twelve Israelite spies sent out by Moses into Canaan, then stricken with plague for coming back with intel that displeased their overlords.

At approx. one word per long, footnoted page, it seems hopeless, almost impertinent, to try to summarise The Secret World: a list of just the ‘firsts’ would take up half this magazine. What’s more, ‘intelligence’ includes a multitude of sins. But pulling together, variously, the threads of deception, subversion, image analysis, psychological operations, covert operations, propaganda, espionage, signals intelligence (Andrew’s chief hobby-horse) and what the KGB called ‘active measures’ (that is, killing) – or, in Clausewitz’s characteristically straightforward wording: ‘every sort of information about the enemy and his country – the basis, in short, of our own plans and operations’ – Andrew’s brightly-coloured tapestry depicts the following:

Egyptian-Hittite diplomatic correspondence (intercepted); the presence of seers in Classical militaries (ridiculous); Caesar’s early use of ‘substitution ciphers’; China’s 2000-year-long insularity; Mauryan India’s enthusiasm for assassination; the formative ‘Secret Stage’ of Islam; the 13th-century internal crusades of Christianity; the commercial intelligence of Renaissance Venice (‘the custodian of the archives was illiterate to prevent his reading their contents’); Ivan the Terrible; the intelligence partnership between Elizabeth I and the ruthless Walsingham; Richelieu’s Cabinet Noir; the original Special Relationship, between the English and the Dutch … [we’re approaching p200 now] … and so on, up to the grotesque return of holy warfare in our own supposedly enlightened era.

This is not simply by way of a completist stratagem. Israeli security services, Andrew points out, take their mottoes – and their remit – from religious scripture. Likewise Sun Tzu, the Indian Arthashastra, and the Hadiths all actively feed into contemporary, real-world conceptions of what intelligence is for, and even how to go about it. Andrew’s avowed intent is ‘to recover some of the lost history of global intelligence over the last three millennia, to show how it modifies current historiography, and to demonstrate its continuing relevance to intelligence in the twenty-first century.’

Straightening out the ‘non-linear’ history of intelligence is one thing: peaks and troughs occur, nations scale back intelligence activities in peacetime, and official secrets legislation hinders research. Few people had heard of Bletchley Park for decades after WWII; and Cold War history to date remains misshapen by the Kremlin’s ability to better keep a secret than the CIA.

But Andrew is determined to correct the ‘long-term historical amnesia’ not only for the purpose of tweedy, collegiate assessment, but also for the sake of ongoing intelligence. Wars, not surprisingly, routinely prove a hasty turning point. But Xenophon suggested it was probably a good idea to give some thought to spies before hostilities (a lesson repeatedly unlearned over the intervening ages) – and yet for most of the hundred years between Waterloo and WWI, Britain essentially had no intelligence infrastructure. It is absurd to have to reflect of Bletchley Park (e.g.), that ‘no other wartime profession was as ignorant of its own past.’ Andrew fairly grinds his teeth at the thought of Allied cryptanalysts busy reinventing the wheel (or many spokes of it), completely unaware their predecessors had helped repel the Armada and defeat Napoleon doing just this sort of work.

‘The value of even the best intelligence,’ of course, ‘is only as great as the use made of it.’ The Secret World, inevitably, contains a litany of ‘intelligence failures’ which are, often as not, in fact broader political ones. The burning of the English fleet in the Medway (no budget); Pearl Harbour (inherent racism); Stalin before Operation Barbarossa (Trotsky mania); the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (missed by CIA; but ill-considered by the KGB). Andrew admits it’s possible to get away with these: at its height, the Roman Empire had so many soldiers that there were essentially no rebellions, and no need for much intelligence. But the same cannot be said of our ‘Forever Wars’.

A lifelong academic, bestseller of intelligence scoops like the Mitrokhin archive, and official historian of MI5 (in which role, if in no other, he is enrolled in the Security Service), Professor Andrew knows whereof he speaks – and, no doubt, from time to time, whereof he must keep silence.

Though not shy to repeat himself to make a point (he laments, as scholars will, that other historians fail to note the vital issues in his field), this magisterial result is highly readable, if barely portable. Needless to say, it’s packed with fascinating characters. And with 200 pages of notes and bibliography that are an absolute trove for the intelligencer (not to mention raw material for several dozen novels), The Secret World looks certain to become a standard reference work for graduate intelligence-type courses, and beyond.

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For The Oldie

— The Nelson Evening Mail, August 31 1906

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There is a typo in Punjabi birth certificates.

Since January 2013, a Russian cruise ship has been drifting unmanned in the North Atlantic.

Toxic trolls are pushing Vicky and Ferne too far.

Jan Ladislav Dussek is the fattest composer on records.

The 50^th Annual Spring Lunch of the Concrete Society (London & South East Region) will be held this Friday at the KIA Oval. Tickets £90+VAT.

Richard Dawkins’ real first name is ‘Clinton’.

In the 1600s, some doctors recommended their patients fart in jars to help treat exposure to the bubonic plague.

Only one person can make instant coffee at a time.

In sudden leaps the flexible tiger appears.

A Melchizedek holds the equivalent of 40 standard bottles of wine.

Reasons for admission to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum (1864-1889) included ‘bad whiskey’, ‘masturbation for 30 years’, and ‘novel reading’.

Every Mother’s Day needs a Mother’s Night.

Americans do not have kettles.