Little Beagle
Lucy Wooding: Early Modern Espionage, 12 September 2024
All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil
by Stephen Alford.
Allen Lane, 424 pp., £30, July,978 0 241 42347 9 Show More
by Stephen Alford.
Allen Lane, 424 pp., £30, July,
Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration
by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman.
Yale, 317 pp., £20, June,978 0 300 26754 9 Show More
by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman.
Yale, 317 pp., £20, June,
“... mattered, so too did transactions made in secret. Both his book and Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman’s Spycraft make reference to what Ben Jonson had to say about intelligencers. He called them spies and said they were ‘lights in state, but of base stuff’, comparing them to cheap candles, or tapers, ‘who, when you’ve burned yourselves ... ”