Ex-Head of MI5 on torture

A fascinating talk last night at the House of Lords by Eliza Manningham-Buller, the ex-Head of MI5, where she admitted that the Americans had been less than forthcoming about their mistreatment of detainees to the British secret service. Here is the BBC report on the issue and here is the report on it by the Huffington Post in the US. She made it very clear that the British view was that torture was completely unacceptable and that to use torture was to become like the enemy you were trying to fight.

Mussolini the Spy

News has emerged the Italian Fascist dictator got an early break when he was paid £100 a week to spy for MI5, the British intelligence agency. Working as a journalist, he was paid to spread positive propaganda to ensure Italy continued to fight in World War 1 as an ally of the British. Cambridge historian Peter Martlett writes, "Britain's least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia's pullout from the conflict...It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the £4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash...I have no evidence to prove it, but I suspect that Mussolini also spent a good deal of the money on his mistresses."

PS: The official authorised history of MI5 has just been published. Here is a review.

David Starkey on MP3

Here is a podcast of David Starkey speaking on the events of 1605 (The Gunpowder Plot) for Cambridge University. It would appear that both Oxford and Cambridge have been busy creating mp3s from some of their most eminent academics, so if you spot any other good ones, please let us know.

PS: Here's a list of interesting historical podcasts, including this one on codebreaking by the official historian of MI5