摘要：Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University is the author of fourteen previous books and is noted as Britain's leading expert on the history of Intelligence. His reputation for scholarly expertise in that field led Britain's Security Service (MI5) to grant him the unprecedented archival access necessary to write this work marking MI5s 2009 centenary. The result is 851 pages of printed text with another few hundred pages of notes, many of which contain narrative that is informative in its own right. In short, this is a detailed history of the Security Service, at times highly entertaining and informative, always even-handed and well-written, but nonetheless a tome that is not for the reader with merely casual interest in the subject
