Book and Film Recommendations

Director: Guy Ritchie | Release date in US: 15 May 2026

A covert team of elite operatives are living in the shadows. When a ruthless despot steals a billion-dollar fortune, they're sent to take it back-an impossible heist that erupts into a deadly game of strategy, deception and survival.

G R Berridge | Diplofoundation | 27 January 2026

Ambassadors, Journalists and Spies brings together three of Professor G. R. Berridge's influential works in a single volume, offering a compact yet wide-ranging history of diplomacy from antiquity to the twenty-first century.

The collection opens with The Diplomacy of Ancient Greece: A Short Introduction, which reveals the classical world not only as a theatre of war but as a pioneering laboratory of diplomatic practice, where alliances were forged, commerce sustained, and relations managed through special embassies and proxenoi, citizens acting on behalf of foreign city-states. It then moves to Victorian Britain in Diplomacy, Satire and the Victorians: The Life and Writings of E. C. Grenville-Murray, a richly researched and newly abridged study of a brilliant but rebellious diplomat-journalist whose sharp satire and public criticism repeatedly brought him into conflict with the Foreign Office, culminating in his dismissal. The volume concludes with Diplomacy and Secret Service: A Short Introduction, an updated examination of the evolving and often uneasy relationship between diplomats and intelligence officers, tracing how rivalry and suspicion gradually gave way to pragmatic cooperation.

Together, these studies show diplomacy as a practice shaped not only by institutions and rules, but by information, secrecy, personality, and the shifting boundaries between representation, reporting, and espionage.

Editors: Mark Stout, Sarah-Jane Corke | University Press of Kansas | 24 June 2025

Secrets on Display takes readers on a tour of the thrilling, real-life history of intelligence and espionage from around the world. With tales of spies, codebreakers, moles, terrorist-hunters, spy chiefs, propagandists, and secret agents, these new histories uncover a world that many of us only see in the movies. Bringing together stories and artifacts from the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, this book makes the world’s largest museum devoted to intelligence history accessible to everyone.

Secrets on Display brings this hidden history to life with over 200 photographs, including nearly 100 color images of artifacts—among them, James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, the axe used to assassinate Leon Trotsky, a portion of the secret MI6 and CIA tunnel beneath East Berlin, and a precursor to the Predator drone, as well as concealment devices, secret cameras, disguise kits, cipher machines, and a host of other rare objects seldom seen by the public.

These stories, told by historians, intelligence officers, and museum professionals, will fascinate scholars, intrigue practitioners, and entice those interested in a world of secrecy that most of us can scarcely imagine.

David A. Charters, Andrea Siew

Georgetown University Press | 3 October 2022

Canadian intelligence has become increasingly central to the operations of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Canadian Military Intelligence: Operations and Evolution from the October Crisis to the War in Afghanistan is the first comprehensive history that examines the impact of tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence on the Canadian military.

Drawing upon a wide range of original documents and interviews with participants in specific operations, author David A. Charters provides an inside perspective on the development of military intelligence since the Second World War. He shows how intelligence influenced key military operations, from domestic internal security to peacekeeping efforts to high-intensity air campaigns―including the October Crisis of 1970, the Oka Crisis, the Gulf War, peacekeeping and enforcement operations in the Balkans, and the war in Afghanistan. He describes how decades of experience, innovation, and increasingly close cooperation with its Five Eyes and NATO allies allowed Canada's military intelligence to punch above its weight. Its tactical effectiveness and ability to overcome challenges reshaped the outlook of military commanders, and intelligence emerged from the margins to become a central feature of military and defense operations.

Canadian Military Intelligence offers lessons from the past and critical implications for future intelligence support with the creation of the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command. This book will be essential to both intelligence history and military history readers and collections.