British Liberal leaders
The British Liberal Party, and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, has a good claim to be the oldest political party in the world. From the Whigs of 1679 to the formation of the Liberal Party in 1859, and then to 1988 and the merger with the Social Democratic Party to form tod…
British Liberal leaders
The British Liberal Party, and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, has a good claim to be the oldest political party in the world. From the Whigs of 1679 to the formation of the Liberal Party in 1859, and then to 1988 and the merger with the Social Democratic Party to form tod…
The British Liberal Party, and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, has a good claim to be the oldest political party in the world. From the Whigs of 1679 to the formation of the Liberal Party in 1859, and then to 1988 and the merger with the Social Democratic Party to form tod…
Since the mid-1980s, the Catholic Church has been embroiled in a profound crisis of clerical sexual abuse. In many Western countries, paedophile priests have been exposed and convicted, and the Church's moral and social standing has suffered deeply. Scandals in Ireland and Ameri…
'How much filth is there in the Church, even among those who, in the priesthood, should belong entirely to God.' Pope Benedict XVI's lament at a Good Friday Mass in 2005 Over recent decades, a sex abuse scandal has engulfed the worldwide Catholic Church. Today, there remains a v…
Capitalism has lifted millions out of poverty. Under its guiding hand, living standards throughout the Western world have been transformed. Further afield, the trail blazed by Japan is being followed by other emerging market countries across the globe, creating prosperity on a b…
In this extraordinary book senior Financial Times columnist John Plender highlights and investigates a concern about the moral character of money that pre-dates the industrial revolution by more than two millennia. He explores this paradoxical aspect of the system in a historica…
The autobiography of the so-called 'Ace of Spies', the master of deception Ian Fleming would later use as a model for James Bond. The first part of the book is Reilly's life as told from his personal notes, and more specifically his attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in R…
A real-life James Bond, alleged to have spied for at least four nations and executed on the direct orders of Stalin himself, Sidney Reilly left a trail of false identities that made him precisely the type of person the secret intelligence service needed as an agent. Hero, conman…
Annotation
Colonel Richard Heslop, codenamed Xavier, was one of Britain's greatest special operations agents in France, organising resistance groups to sabotage German operations from late 1942 right through to D-Day. Yet his name barely gets a mention in many of the accounts of the Specia…
Colonel Richard Heslop, alias Xavier, was one of Britain's Greatest Special Operations agents in France. Ingeniously orchestrating resistance groups and ruthlessly sabotaging German operations, Xavier played a crucial role in Allied espionage during the war, from late 1942 right…