Book and Film Recommendations

Director: Various | 2018, 1 Season

Immersive history series focusing on one of World War II's most covert organizations, Britain's Special Operations Executive. A group of modern-day volunteers undertake the SOE agent training program.

Stephan Talty | Dutton | 9 June 2026

In 1942, as head of the newly formed OSS, Wild Bill Donovan deployed spies across Europe and around the world to try to thwart the Nazis. In Greece, Nazis weren’t just taking over territory; they were seizing and threatening to destroy some of the world’s most important and valuable historical monuments and artifacts. So, Donovan tapped a young Ivy League-trained archaeologist named Rodney Young to assemble and lead a team of spies to collect intel.

Young set about recruiting the most unlikely of spies—academics, classicists, epigraphers, and other specialists and scholars—who would come to be kown as “the Greek Desk.” These men and women, along with their Greek allies, went undercover and tried desperately to protect some of the world’s most significant treasures. The archaeologists hid priceless artifacts in ancient caves, bank vaults, and even underneath the city of Athens itself. They created fakes to give over to the Nazis to appease their lust for these remarkable works. Ultimately, when it became clear the cat-and- mouse game on its own wasn’t going to save Athens, they brought in an army of Greek American soldiers to beat back the Nazi regime and save their homeland.

Harry Richards | Bloomsbury Academic | 18 September 2025

Following the declaration of war in 1914, German spies were sighted across Britain as a potent form of ‘spy fever’ supposedly gripped the nation. This book questions the extent to which British society was truly terrified of German spies and explores the broader impacts of secret warfare during the early stages of the First World War. Harry Richards analyses the belief that a clandestine network of spies and saboteurs, mostly comprised of naturalised aliens domiciled in Britain, had successfully infiltrated all elements of society and were poised to destroy Britain’s war effort from within. Although that danger never fully materialised, the spy peril remained a dominant feature of radical politics and popular culture throughout the First World War. Why images of German spies were so appealing and enduring during this period is the subject of this book.

British ‘Spy Fever’ in the First World War contends that our understanding of ‘spy fever’ is in need of significant revision. Whereas previous studies typically characterise society’s reaction to the spy peril as one of hysteria, this book shows that our understanding of ‘spy fever’ should encompass a wider variety of emotions and experiences. British society was certainly obsessed with images of German espionage, but this seldom resulted in psychological disorder. Each chapter therefore examines different emotional experiences: alarm, terror, excitement, anxiety, hope, anger, and enjoyment to highlight the diverse and complex reactions towards the enemy within.

Richard H. Graham | Zenith Press | 12 May 2013

At the height of the Cold War in 1964, President Johnson announced a new aircraft dedicated to strategic reconnaissance. The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane flew more than three-and-a-half times the speed of sound, so fast that no other aircraft could catch it. Above 80,000 feet, its pilots had to wear full-pressure flight suits similar to what was used aboard the space shuttle. Developed by the renowned Lockheed Skunk Works, the SR-71 was an awesome aircraft in every respect, and it took the world by storm.

The SR-71 was in service with the U.S. Air Force from 1964 to 1998, when it was withdrawn from use, superseded by satellite technology. Twelve of the thirty-two aircraft were destroyed in accidents, but none were ever lost to enemy action. Throughout its thirty-four-year career, the SR-71 was the world’s fastest and highest-flying operational manned aircraft. It set world records for altitude and speed: an absolute altitude record of 85,069 feet on July 28, 1974, and an absolute speed record of 2,193.2 miles per hour on the same day. On September 1, 1974, it set a speed and time record over a recognized course between New York and London (3,508 miles) of 1,435.587 miles per hour and an elapsed time of 1 hour, 54 minutes, 56.4 seconds.

SR-71 covers every aspect of the SR-71’s development, manufacture, modification, and active service from the insider’s perspective of one its pilots and is lavishly illustrated with more than 200 photos.