I hope you aren’t referring to Bob Monkhouse

Entertaining letter from Conan Doyle about Balfour here: www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Lo...

Balfour. I believe he and his brother were both presidents of the SPR at different times.

Adam Hall’s Quiller books, though sadly out of print, are fabulous. The Warsaw Document, The Tango Briefing (set in N Africa) or The 9th Directive would be good ones to start with. There is a very odd film version of the first book (The Berlin Memorandum) with a screenplay by Pinter.

Exactly: he wrote to Michael Kennedy “For actual coda, see end of Wells’ Tono-Bungay”.

Ah I’d forgotten that- was it the river journey at the end of the novel that specifically inspired RVW?

Tono-Bungay is a total masterpiece and influenced novels by Forster, Bennett and Conrad as well as Lawrence. It’s partly based on the swindler Whitaker Wright who financed the Bakerloo Line, built an underwater ballroom & took cyanide in the Royal Courts of Justice in 1904.

The link to the 6 projects is broken

Have a look at Noemi Bouhana’s S5 inference framework for radicalisation to extremism. I suspect it will resonate with your observations

Killers of the Flower Moon (David Grann) is a cracker about expansion of the US in 1900s. SC Gwynne’s books are superb - Rebel Yell (about Stonewall Jackson) and Empire of the Summer Moon (about the Comanches). I’m sure you’ve read Kynaston’s brilliant social histories of post-war uk…

Is there a GDPR “issue” here maybe? Data protection regs seem to terrify people into not sharing information they should be sharing.