Phillip Knightley – författare

In 1909, the business of spying was hoisted from the domain of a few European descendents to the highest reaches of British government with the formation of Britain's SIS. Acting in response to a totally fraudulent fear--the German spy scare that preceded World War I--the British soon had a lot of company as Germany, Russia, France, and other powers large and small joined the mad rush toward information and espionage. Not far behind came the biggest of them all, first with the OSS and then with the CIA, fueled by paranoia and by more money than any new bureaucracy had ever seen. "Bigger than State by '48," was the CIA's slogan on its founding in 1947. And it was.Now intelligence is a very big business with a very rich history, told here with a depth and verve never before brought to the subject, by a master historian. All of the legends and their immensely readable stories and here--Sorge, Donovan, Philby, Mata Hari, Golitsyn, Angleton, Penkovsky--and behind them a large question: did any act of these spies and their masters make any difference at all in the course of history?

Australia celebrated one hundred years as a nation in 2001. This book - part history, part travelogue, part memoir - tells the inspiring story of how a one-time British colony of convicts turned itself into a prosperous and confident country. Through the eyes of ordinary people, Phillip Knightley describes Australia's journey, from federation and the trauma of the First World War, the desperate poverty of the Depression, with its attendant spectres of secret armies and near-civil war, the threat of invasion in the Second World War and the immigration that followed it, and the slow but steady decline in the relationship with Britain, the 'Mother Country', as Australia forged its own unique identity.