Reviews, Forthcoming, New Releases, Overlooked
Paul Coates | Netflix series | 2026
Ex-spies Simon and Meret operate a Berlin safe house until a past threat resurfaces. Now they're fleeing hitmen, Russian agents, German BND, ex-lovers, and old enemies while trying to save their marriage.
Simon Willmetts, et al | Georgetown University Press | 02 March 2026
Intelligence agencies are traditionally understood as cloistered entities. Hidden behind a veil of secrecy, they conduct their activities relatively free from public scrutiny, and their assessments are ideally detached from the cultural and political biases that pervade our fallen world.
Today, however, intelligence services have come in from the cold. They feature routinely in our popular culture and our political debates. Our ideas about them, from "deep state" conspiracy theories to popular tropes drawn from spy fiction and cinema, have even influenced the outcome of major elections. Likewise, as John Le Carré once put it, intelligence officers do not sit "like monks in a cell" but are themselves products of the social, political, and cultural domains they inhabit.
Spies, Culture, and Society brings together some of the world's leading experts on intelligence and its wider impact to explore different aspects of this reciprocal relationship between spies, culture, and society. The topics covered include the influence of spy films and novels, interactions between spies and journalists, the historical roots of the "deep state" conspiracy theory, Western intelligence and imperialism, and more. Together, these chapters showcase a new way of understanding intelligence agencies as fundamentally integrated into the cultures, societies, and political systems that they seek to analyze and protect.
Offering meaningful insights for intelligence studies scholars, Cold War historians, and media scholars, this collection offers a new paradigm for understanding intelligence agencies as fundamentally integrated into the cultures and societies they seek to protect.
James D.J. Brown | Oxford University Press | 01 August 2025
Richard Sorge is one of history's most famous spies. This hard-drinking, womanizing, motorcycle-crashing Soviet officer penetrated the German embassy in Tokyo during the 1930s and gathered intelligence credited with changing the course of the Second World War. It is an intriguing tale; but Sorge's spy ring was just one chapter in a much longer history of Russian and Soviet espionage in and against Japan.
Cracking the Crab tells the extraordinary full story of Russian intrigue targeting Japan, from first encounters in the eighteenth century to the Soviet declaration of war in August 1945. Colorful episodes include Gojong, King of Korea, being smuggled into the Russian legation dressed as a woman in 1896; the 1927 'Tanaka Memorial', an infamous forgery purporting to be Japan's hidden plan for world domination; and the secret intelligence of 'Nero', a Soviet agent supplying invaluable insight into Japanese strategy during the Second World War.
From Russians murdered in broad daylight in Meiji Tokyo to Soviet honey traps and 'white magic' at the Battle of Nomonhan, this is a landmark history of the covert struggle between two great powers of the modern age.
Lewis Sage-Passant | Edinburgh Press | 31 October 2024
Scholars have long viewed intelligence as the preserve of nation states. Where the term ‘private sector intelligence’ is used, the focus has been overwhelmingly on government contractors. As such, a crucial aspect of intelligence power has been overlooked: the use of intelligence by corporations to navigate and influence the world. Where there has been academic scrutiny of the field, it is seen as a post-9/11 phenomenon, and that a state monopoly of intelligence has been eroded. Beyond States and Spies demonstrates - through original research - that such a monopoly never existed. Private sector intelligence is at least as old as the organised intelligence activities of the nation state. The book offers a comparative examination of private and public intelligence, and makes a compelling case for understanding the dangers posed by unregulated intelligence in private hands. Overall, this casts new light on a hitherto under investigated academic space.