The history of Britain’s secret war on Napoleon is astonishing, inspiring and disturbing
Allan Mallinson
"It is a fact of dirty warfare, though, that not all its practitioners, even the spymasters, come from good schools. There are 150 or so names listed in Clayton’s ‘cast of characters’ (Baroness Orczy meets John Le Carré). Their motives are various — noble, venal and unfathomable. At the MI6 end of the recruiting spectrum there was the Eton- and Oxford-educated barrister John Reeves, who had studied the Paris police a decade earlier, and who was charged with the expansion of the London police in 1792 (on the Bow Street model) to keep watch on French refugees flooding into the capital, and to prevent revolution. At the rather more MI5 end was Evan Nepean, son of a Cornish innkeeper, who had been apprenticed as a clerk in the Royal Navy before, in 1782, becoming an under-secretary at the newly created Home Office, and who masterminded the covert operations at home and abroad. What both had in common, however, was intense patriotism and capacity for hard work...."