"The Secret History of MI6"

The Secret History of MI6 (Keith Jeffery)

Here's an odd bird: An offical history of a secret intellegence organization. Bear in mind this is the real history of MI6 (nee SIS), so instead of James Bond parachuting away from an exploding blimp and snowboarding down the mountain he lands on while outrunning the fireball, you're going to be reading about people trying to get jobs in shipyards and stealing documents from the garbage.
Now that's all well and good and I wish I could recommend this book, but I can't. The book is weirdly dry and bloodless. A lot of the book - feels like 90% at times - is wasted detailing SIS' endless reorganizations, which is just as exciting as it sounds. My eyes started glazing over and then I started skipping pages as SIS got reorganized again and again, with the nadir coming as the section on SIS activites in World War 2 threatens to get exciting and is hit like a car on the train tracks by another fucking reorganization.
With that out of the way, the remaining material is pretty interesting - my favorite parts actually come almost at the end of the book when Q branch starts up and begins wrestling with stuff like a safe that can destroy everything in it in the time it takes a man to run up the stairs. But the "remaining material" is very sparse; Most of the book is a bureaucrat's view of SIS, where everyone is minuting thier asses off about how the organization should be set up. Not terribly thrilling, in other words, and tough to recommend unless you're adept at skipping large chunks, or really, really interested in the permanent under-secretary minuting about the report prepared by Sir Biffy Tushsniffington about which Section of SIS should report to which branch controlled by which assistant director. A sad missed opprotunity.

Grade: D+