Disrupt and Deny is the untold story behind Britain's secret scheming against both enemies and friends from 1945 to the present day. British leaders use spies and Special Forces to interfere in the affairs of others discreetly and deniably. Since 1945, MI6 has spread misinformation designed to divide and discredit targets from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland. It has instigated whispering campaigns and planted false evidence on officials working behind the Iron Curtain, tried to foment revolution in Albania, blown up ships to prevent the passage of refugees to Israel, and secretly funnelled aid to insurgents in Afghanistan and dissidents in Poland. MI6 has launched cultural and economic warfare against Iceland and Czechoslovakia. It has tried to instigate coups in Congo, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere. Through bribery and blackmail, Britain has rigged elections as colonies moved to independence. Britain has fought secret wars in Yemen, Indonesia, and Oman - and discreetly used Special Forces to eliminate enemies from colonial Malaya to Libya during the Arab Spring. This is covert action: a vital, though controversial, tool of statecraft and perhaps the most sensitive of all government activity. If used wisely, it can play an important role in pursuing national interests in a dangerous world. If used poorly, it can cause political scandal - or worse. In Disrupt and Deny, Rory Cormac tells the remarkable true story of Britain's secret scheming against its enemies, as well as its friends; of intrigue and manoeuvring within the darkest corridors of Whitehall, where officials fought to maintain control of this most sensitive and seductive work; and, above all, of Britain's attempt to use smoke and mirrors to mask decline. He reveals hitherto secret operations, the slush funds that paid for them, and the battles in Whitehall that shaped them.
Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac reveal the remarkable relationship between the British Royal Family and the intelligence community, from the reign of Queen Victoria, through two world wars and the Cold War, to the present day. Based on painstaking archival research, the authors have uncovered a wealth of detail that changes our understanding of the role of the monarch in modern British politics, intelligence, and international relations. Far from being a dry tome, on page after page Crown, Cloak, and Dagger offers surprising revelations and stories of intrigue. The book begins with the reign of Queen Victoria, when persistent attempts to assassinate her demanded the creation of security services. Successive queens and kings have all played an active role in steering British intelligence, sometimes running parallel networks against the wishes of prime ministers. Even today, Queen Elizabeth II receives "copy No.1" of every intelligence report and likely knows more state secrets than any person alive. This book demonstrates that even in the era of constitutional monarchy, queens and kings continue to be far more than figureheads of state. Crown, Cloak, and Dagger is a fascinating and fast-paced history that will inform as well as entertain anyone with an interest in history, espionage, and the Royal Family"--
This book charts the journey, in terms of both stasis and change, that masculinities and manhood have made in Irish drama, and by extension in the broader culture and society, from the 1960s to the present. Examining a diverse corpus of drama and theatre events, both mainstream and on the fringe, this study critically elaborates a seismic shift in Irish masculinities. This book argues, then, that Irish manhood has shifted from embodying and enacting post-colonial concerns of nationalism and national identity, to performing models of masculinity that are driven and moulded by the political and cultural practices of neoliberal capitalism. Masculinities and Manhood in Contemporary Irish Drama charts this shift through chapters on performing masculinity in plays set in both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, and through several chapters that focus on Women’s and Queer drama. It thus takes its readers on a journey: a journey that begins with an overtly patriarchal, nationalist manhood that often made direct comment on the state of the nation, and ultimately arrives at several arguably regressive forms of globalised masculinity, which are couched in misaligned notions of individualism and free-choice and that frequently perceive themselves as being in crisis.
Seamus Joyce has got a few things on his mind. He has just been appointed Acting Director of iDEA, the Irish Drug Enforcement Agency. His wife is in hospital, dying of an unidentified ailment. And he is starting to question the purpose of his own existence. It's a tricky time at iDEA: an ambitious new Minister for Justice is anxious to secure a few big scalps in the Dublin drug trade, and Joyce is expected to put himself on the front line of the fight. Soon he begins to suspect that the police, in league with the Minister, are bending the rules - and he still doesn't quite understand what the rules are. Why is money being paid into his bank account from an unnamed source in Liechtenstein? Why are his phones being tapped? And why are troubled schoolgirl and a diminutive nun accusing him of being at the heart of a lethal conspiracy
The two world wars were undoubtedly two of the most catastrophic events in human history, not just for those who actually fought in them, but for untold millions of civilians. And even though the wars' superlativeness is unquestioned, our understanding of exactly how bad the civilian costs were is limited. Although the numbers are better for the two wars than for most earlier wars, gaps and uncertainties remain. States went to great lengths to record military casualties, but civilian fatalities often went uncounted, and figures were often deliberately obscured. In this book, renowned economic historian Cormac O Grada aims to set the record straight, establishing a figure for civilian fatalities that reveals much about the nature of modern war. The book builds on earlier estimates of casualties from a range of causes, some reliable, some approximate at best, and warns against spurious precision when approximations are impossible. For example, while the human toll of the Jewish Holocaust is generally agreed to have been about 6 million, the tolls of two other war genocides, those of the Armenian community in Turkey during World War I and of the European Roma community during World War II, cannot be determined with any precision. (Scholarly estimates of these range from 0.6 to 1.2 million, and from "at least 130,000" to "between 250,000 and 500,000.") During World War II Chinese civilians faced both a civil war and Japanese occupation, and no estimate of the resulting civilian deaths, which range from an implausibly low 2.5 million to 20 million, is reliable. The book shows that the single biggest cause of civilian deaths during the two wars were famines, some of which are familiar and well-documented, while others have attracted research only recently, and a few await systematic analysis. The book covers these as well as genocides, particularly the Jewish Holocaust, and deaths from aerial bombing, and shows how in each of these categories the numbers have been controversial and contested. Most of the book deals with death, but it contains accounts too of the tens of millions of displaced persons and refugees and forced labourers, of civilian trauma, and of sexual violence and other atrocities. In the end O Grada argues that the two world wars cost at least 45 to 50 million civilian lives, almost double the cost in military lives. Addressing the uncertainties and inaccuracies in civilian casualties, the book shows the failings of international law and gives a vital and harrowing understanding of the true cost of war"--
King's College, Dublin, an ancient and thoroughly mediocre institution, is in crisis. It is also Sèamus Joyce's alma mater. When Sèamus is hired to provide a consultant's report on the university for an American consortium, he doesn't have any idea what he's in for. As various disgruntled and long-winded academics try to influence his report, Sèamus realizes that the rot at King's runs deep - and that various forces are keen to clip his wings. Why did somebody steal his mobile phone from his room, while ignoring a large amount of cash? Why does an old flame from student days, now on the staff at King's, crawl into his bed - and almost as quickly crawl out? And why do so many people seem to have such a deep interest in the goings on at King's? Sèamus thinks it might have something to do with the presence on the university board of one of Ireland's leading property developers - and the presence on the university's hallowed (and valuable) grounds of that developer's bulldozers. When, on Seamus's second night at King's, the university's president is murdered, and Sèamus himself is subsequently assaulted by a man who may or may not be the murderer, he knows for certain that the stakes are higher than he could have guessed - and that finding out the truth about King's may be no easier than protecting his own life. The Grounds is the follow-up to Cormac Millar's acclaimed first novel, An Irish Solution.
Seamus Joyce has got a few things on his mind. He has just been appointed Acting Director of iDEA, the Irish Drug Enforcement Agency. His wife is in hospital, dying of an unidentified ailment. And he is starting to question the purpose of his own existence. It's a tricky time at iDEA: an ambitious new Minister for Justice is anxious to secure a few big scalps in the Dublin drug trade, and Joyce is expected to put himself on the front line of the fight. Soon he begins to suspect that the police, in league with the Minister, are bending the rules - and he still doesn't quite understand what the rules are. Why is money being paid into his bank account from an unnamed source in Liechtenstein? Why are his phones being tapped? And why are troubled schoolgirl and a diminutive nun accusing him of being at the heart of a lethal conspiracy
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