In Churchill's Secret War, the author brings to light a plan to open a second front in the Balkans, from Turkey across the eastern Mediterranean, to hasten D-Day in the west. He also reveals new information on the Cicero spy scandal in 1943 when top secret Foreign Office documents were stolen in Ankara by the British Ambassador's valet, who passed them to the Germans. This was the biggest Foreign Office security lapse until the Burgess and Maclean affair some twenty years later. Robin Denniston has been afforded access to the secret wartime files that Churchill valued so highly. The result is a thorough, scholarly and original insight into Churchill's secret 'war within a war'.

Britain's Secret Propaganda War is the first book to be written about The Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) -- an important chapter in the history of the Cold War. The narrative is driven by actual accounts of IRD covert operations and includes a number of "exclusives." The IRD was set up under the Labour Government in 1948 and clandestinely financed from the Secret Intelligence Service budget. A large organisation with close links to MI6 -- with whom it shared many personnel -- it waged a vigorous covert propaganda campaign against Eastern Bloc Communism for nearly thirty years using journalists, politicians, academics and trade unionists -none of whom were "unwitting." Such famous names as George Orwell, Denis Healey, Stephen Spender, Bertrand Russell and Guy Burgess helped or backed the work of IRD.

Dr Anthony Seldon tells the history of this world-famous institution, and takes us on a guided tour of the building. The book contains 200 exclusive photographs of the interiors specially commissioned from a leading architectural photographer.