‘As gripping as any spy thriller. Hastings understands, better than any previous historian, that this is as much a story about human nature as it is about the mechanics of code-breaking or spycraft … he has the novelist’s eye for the telling detail … this book works because Hastings is simply a very fine writer who is not afraid of making judgements … Hastings’s achievement is especially impressive, for he has produced the best single volume yet written on the subject’ Lawrence Rees, Sunday Times

‘This is his war and he writes with an easy assurance, scatter-gunning opinions … Hastings is on form. He has set out to provide thought and discussion and, with his familiar robustness, shotgun at side, he has succeeded’ The Times

‘Authoritative, exciting and notably well written’ Daily Telegraph

‘A serious work of rigorous and comprehensive history … royally entertaining and readable’ Mail on Sunday

‘Vintage Hastings: a vivid cast of characters, social observation and opinions forcefully expressed … Given the national fixation with spies and special forces, Hastings’s book is a very necessary corrective’ Evening Standard

‘Lively and entertaining … a rich gallery of rogues, eccentrics and brainstorming professors which … Hastings can manipulate with wonderful deftness’ Observer

‘A compendious, crisply argued and witty assessment of the intelligence operations of the major powers’ Financial Times

‘A magisterial account … his great strength is to use his formidable journalistic talents to bring alive a cast of characters who operated in the shadows and it is the mark of an author at the top of his game that he is able to keep a multiplicity of narratives running without causing confusion … a worthy addition’ Country Life