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Christopher Andrew's The Secret World is a single-volume history of espionage and intelligence gathering from biblical times to the present. Andrew, a Cambridge historian and official historian of MI5, argues that modern agencies forgot lessons their predecessors had already learned, from broken Napoleonic codes to Elizabethan spy networks. It is a long, dense book, but reviewers call it readable and often dryly funny. It suits readers who want serious history rather than thriller-style spy stories, and it stands apart from single-agency or single-war accounts by covering three millennia in one narrative.
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Reviewers rate the book highly for its scope and scholarship. Ben Macintyre in The New York Times Book Review called it comprehensive, easy to dip into and surprisingly funny, and The Times called it accurate, comprehensive, digestible and startling.
The Secret World is a global history of espionage by historian Christopher Andrew, a New York Times bestselling author. It covers about three thousand years of intelligence history, from the Bible to the present day.
The book argues that the history of espionage is far older than today's intelligence agencies and has been largely forgotten. For example, the WWII codebreakers at Bletchley Park did not know that their predecessors had broken Napoleon's codes and those of Spain before the Spanish Armada.
It also compares how leaders have understood intelligence. It contrasts Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Asquith at the outbreak of WWI with George Washington during the Revolutionary War and eighteenth-century British statesmen. The book includes illustrations.
