His position regarding intelligence generally is highly skeptical, and his views on the literature are robust. He rightly considers much of the material published on the French resistance as “romantic twaddle” (xxvi); he condemns Anthony Cave Brown’s Bodyguard of Lies as “largely a work of fiction”; and he sees William Stevenson’s notorious A Man Called Intrepid as “wildly fanciful” (xxv). M.R.D. Foot’s histories of Special Operations Executive are “tendentious” and most intelligence operations are “inherently wasteful.” (xix) For good measure, he is also justifiably dismissive of the recent movie The Imitation Game, which has a “negligible relationship to fact” (xxv) and purports to tell the story of Alan Turing.[1]