El Alamein was one of the pivotal battles of the Second World War, fought by armies and air forces on the cutting edge of military technology. Yet Alamein has always had a patchy reputation - with many commentators willing to knock its importance. This book explains just why El Alamein is such a controversial battle. Based on an intensive reading of the contemporary sources, in particular the extensive and recently declassified British bugging of Axis prisoners of war, military historian Simon Ball turns Alamein on its head, explaining it as a cultural defeat for Britain. Alamein is a military history of the battle - showing how different it looks stripped of later cultural excrescences. But it also shows how 'Alamein culture' saturated the post-war world, when archival sources mingled with film, novels, magazines, popular histories, and the rest of Alamein's footprint. Whether you are interested in the battle itself or its cultural afterlife, if you have an opinion about Alamein, you'll question it after reading this book.

As John le Carre's fictional intelligence men admit, it was the case histories - constructed narratives serving shifting agendas - that shaped the British intelligence machine, rather than their personal experience of secret operations. Secret History demonstrates that a critical scrutiny of internal "after action" assessments of intelligence prepared by British officials provides an invaluable and original perspective on the emergence of British intelligence culture over a period stretching from the First World War to the early Cold War. The historical record reflects personal value judgments about what qualified as effective techniques and organization, and even who could rightfully be called an intelligence officer. The history of intelligence thus became a powerful form of self-reinforcing cultural capital. Shining an intense light on the history of Britain's intelligence organizations, Secret History excavates how contemporary myths, misperceptions, and misunderstandings were captured and how they affected the development of British intelligence and the state.