Occasionally tiresome, but Pincher provides a comprehensive, almost irrefutable indictment.
A British military-intelligence specialist exhaustively recounts his country’s woeful 60-year record countering Soviet spying.
Espionage expert Pincher (The Spycatcher Affair, 1988, etc.) digs deep to prove that Roger Hollis, who served from 1936 to 1965 in Britain’s MI-5, was really a Russian agent, code-named “Elli.” Drawing on recently opened Soviet archives, the vast literature recounting British counterintelligence failures and a lifetime of high-level sources developed in England and America, Pincher compiles a damning, if circumstantial, dossier against Hollis, whose lengthy career spans a time made notorious by a number of traitorous names. They include the so-called Cambridge Five—Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess—atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and disgraced cabinet minister John Profumo, whose liaison with model Christine Keeler brought down Harold Macmillan’s government. Pincher also deals with numerous, less well-known characters, notably Ursula Hamburger, or “Sonia,” “the most influential female secret agent of all time.” The author’s surfeit of detail, roll call of shady characters and catalogue of outrageous episodes, misdeeds, deceptions, lies and cover-ups have two effects. First, they underscore Pincher’s immense authority and the overwhelming evidence against Hollis; second, they weary all but the most intensely interested readers. Still, the Hollis matter has for the Brits the same fascination—and features the same furious contention—as the Alger Hiss case once held for Americans. After this book, Hollis’s defenders will be reduced to ascribing the staggering number of documented failures on his watch “merely” to spectacular negligence.
Occasionally tiresome, but Pincher provides a comprehensive, almost irrefutable indictment.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6807-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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