In an interview on the Secret Service

Your final choice is Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community by Christopher Andrew.

I still go back to this book, which was published in 1985. It is a real pioneering wonderful book underpinned by proper academic scholarship. But it is also a great read. It is the sort of book I would have loved to have written myself and I perhaps tried to do it a bit with my recent book.

It also represents a time when Christopher Andrew didn’t have any inside privileged information as he does now [as official historian of MI5]. And it shows just how much you could do because he got it pretty well right, and we are talking about over 25 years ago now. He writes about how the Service built up from the ad hoc nature of the early days in 1909 right through the Second World War when MI5 and MI6 came of age. The book has a wonderful mixture of academic rigour and lightness of touch, which is the ideal of how you would want to write from your ivory tower.

How do you think he managed to get it right, given that he didn’t have access to all the information and archives that have come out recently?

I think professionalism, finding evidence from a range of different sources. And then he used them creatively but he didn’t make stuff up. Some journalists tend to populate their books with re-creations and imagine what it would have been like, which may or may not have happened. As historians we can’t do that. And Christopher Andrew has a core professionalism, which means he cannot and does not do that. He writes well enough not to have to do that.