Cruel Britannia

The official line is clear: the UK does not 'participate in, solicit, encourage or condone' torture. And yet, the evidence is irrefutable: when faced with potential threats to our national security, the gloves always come off. Drawing on previously unseen official documents, and the accounts of witnesses, victims and experts, prize-winning investigative journalist Ian Cobain looks beyond the cover-ups and the equivocations, to get to the truth. From WWII to the War on Terror, via Kenya and Northern Ireland, Cruel Britannia shows how the British have repeatedly and systematically resorted to torture, bending the law where they can, and issuing categorical denials all the while. What emerges is a picture of Britain that challenges our complacency and exposes the lie behind our reputation for fair play.

While the rest of the media lounge in the warm glow of New Labour's rosy dawn, one journalist in Britain has been a consistently sharp and witty scourge of Tony Blair and his bandwagon babes. Step forward Nick Cohen, denizen of the Observer newspaper's celebrated 'Hold on a Minute' column and a writer who has regularly identified Labour's Third Way as the mid-point between truth and lies, decency and hypocrisy, honesty and corruption. Whether he is tearing into Labour's plans to privatize the prison system and introduce curfews for teenagers, or detailing the government's cozying up to Rupert Murdoch and the hot money traders in the City, Cohen maintains a peerless grasp on the power that flows from fusing invective with scrupulous investigation. Even Downing Street Policy Advisor Andrew Adonis was forced to concede that 'no one is better at getting under the Government's skin'. A coruscating barrage of dispatches from his sniper's post, Cruel Britannia celebrates Cohen's lonely stand. It will revivify the disillusioned who anticipated something better from Labour's ascent and fortify those on the left who expected little and received precisely that.

In 1889, the first Official Secrets Act was passed, creating offences of 'disclosure of information' and 'breach of official trust'. It limited and monitored what the public could, and should, be told. Since then a culture of secrecy has flourished. As successive governments have been selective about what they choose to share with the public, we have been left with a distorted and incomplete understanding not only of the workings of the state but of our nation's culture and its past. In this important book, Ian Cobain offers a fresh appraisal of some of the key moments in British history since the end of WWII, including: the measures taken to conceal the existence of Bletchley Park and its successor, GCHQ, for three decades; the unreported wars fought during the 1960s and 1970s; the hidden links with terrorist cells during the Troubles; the sometimes opaque workings of the criminal justice system; the state's peacetime surveillance techniques; and the convenient loopholes in the Freedom of Information Act. Drawing on previously unseen material and rigorous research, The History Thieves reveals how a complex bureaucratic machine has grown up around the British state, allowing governments to evade accountability and their secrets to be buried.

Victorian fashion is unlikely to become popular again. Corsets were in style during the second half of the 1800s and were forced on the waists of girls as young as 5 years old! Tied too tight and the wearer might not be able to sit or breathe, and many sustained broken ribs. More fascinating truths about those living during the Victorian era, including the opium-based drugs used to keep children calm and prison-like schools, will inspire thankfulness in today’s readers! Full-color illustrations offer colorful commentary on this buttoned-up time period as well as supplementary historical details.

The year is 1597. For nearly a decade, the island of Britain has been under the rule of King Philip in the name of Spain. The citizenry live under an enforced curfew—and in fear of the Inquisition’s agents, who put heretics to the torch in public displays. And with Queen Elizabeth imprisoned in the Tower of London, the British have no symbol to unite them against the enemy who occupies their land. William Shakespeare has no interest in politics. His passion is writing for the theatre, where his words bring laughter and tears to a populace afraid to speak out against the tyranny of the Spanish crown. But now Shakespeare is given an opportunity to pen his greatest work—a drama that will incite the people of Britain to rise against their persecutors—and change the course of history.

“A concise and gripping history of the Troubles, revealing the people behind the pain and violence” from the award-winning investigative journalist (Vice). On the morning of Saturday 22nd April 1978, members of an Active Service Unit of the IRA hijacked a car and crossed the countryside to the town of Lisburn. Within an hour, they had killed an off-duty policeman in front of his young son. In Anatomy of a Killing, award-winning journalist Ian Cobain documents the hours leading up to the killing, and the months and years of violence, attrition and rebellion surrounding it. Drawing on interviews with those most closely involved, as well as court files, police notes, military intelligence reports, IRA strategy papers, memoirs and government records, this is a unique perspective on the Troubles, and a revelatory work of investigative journalism. “As gripping as a thriller, except that this isn’t fiction but cold, spine-tingling reality.” —Daily Mail “A remarkable piece of forensic journalism.” —Ed Moloney, author of Voices from the Grave “Reads like a work of fiction . . . True and harrowing.” —Irish Sunday Independent (Books of the Year)

Serial Killer Quarterly's "Cruel Britannia" finishes off 2014 with a four-feature British bloodlust frenzy! Dr. Katherine Ramsland wades through the heavy fog surrounding the "Moors Murders": a series of high-profile child killings committed in the Swinging Sixties by Scottish sadist Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, his English girlfriend and accomplice. To this day, they continue to be the most shocking and headline grabbing crimes in modern Britain! With Katherine's background in psychology and philosophy, there is surely no one better suited to explore Brady's "existentialist exercises" in murder, his psychopathic pedophilia, and folie-a-deux relationship with Hindley. Where the "Moors Murders" remain Britain's most notorious series of murders, the atrocities committed by Fred and Rosemary West are undoubtedly the most depraved. Kim Cresswell churns the stomach with her unbelievable account of incest, bestiality, rape, torture, murder, necrophilia and filicide, culminating in a "Garden of Bones" in Gloucester. Carol Anne Davis looks at one of the greatest abuses of police power in English history: the entrapment of Colin Stagg for the 1992 ripper-style murder of blonde beauty Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common. Meanwhile, the real killer, Robert Napper, was already confined to Broadmoor asylum for the 1993 evisceration murder of Samantha Bisset and the rape and deadly suffocation of her infant daughter. Edgar-Award winning author Burl Barer makes his Serial Killer Quarterly debut, lending his highly original voice to an intriguing re-examination of the murders ascribed to "Yorkshire Ripper" Peter Sutcliffe, and the phenomenon of homicidal fame. Robert J. Hoshowsky, Aaron Elliott, and Kim Cresswell also look at three comparably notorious historical London slayers in their pieces on creepy old John Christie, "Acid Bath Vampire" John George Haigh, and Jack the Ripper suspect and bride poisoner George Chapman. Come take a trip with us into the dark heart of the British Isles, from the gritty northern industrial cities of Leeds, Bradford and Manchester to cosmopolitan London to the verdant countryside of Herefordshire! Warning: this issue contains an abundance of mutilation, necrophilia, and tea.

'Engrossing and powerful . . . rich and thought-provoking' Fara Dabhoiwala, Guardian 'Path-breaking . . . a major rewriting of history' Mihir Bose, Irish Times 'Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and convincing prose.' The Economist The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery. Slave Empire puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In intimate, human detail, Padraic Scanlon shows how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together.