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In The Service Of Empire: Imperialism And The British Spy Thriller 1901-1914

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Of Novels, Intelligence and Policymaking In the Service of Empire: Imperialism and the British Spy Thriller 1901–1914 Dr. Christopher R. Moran and Dr. Robert Johnson “ In the decade before the First World War, the British spy thriller was a cultural phenomenon drawing large and expectant readerships ” across all classes. In the decade before the First World War, the British spy thriller was a cultural phenomenon drawing large and expectant readerships across all classes and catapulting its authors to prominence as spokesmen for then widely prevalent concerns about imperial strength, national power, and foreign espionage. Three hundred is a conservative estimate of the number of spy novels that went into print between 1901 and 1914. This article reflects …show more content…

Admittedly, this is not entirely new ground. In their larger histories of the British intelligence community, Christopher Andrew and Bernard Porter have both shown convincingly how popular authors from the period were implicated in the business of “scare-mongering,” giving voice to a range of public anxieties, from the vulnerability of Britain’s defensive preparations to the specter of foreign espionage.6 David French, David Trotter, and Nicholas Hiley have also provided important contributions on the role of spy fiction in stirring up a hornet’s nest of tension before the First World War.7 We nevertheless feel that there are two avenues that Unashamedly patriotic, their political sensibilities “finely tuned to the cadences of imperial decline,” authors wanted to see more being done by the authorities. British Spy Thrillers Studies in Intelligence Vol. 54, No. 2 (June 2010) 3 require further analysis. First, there is a tendency in the existing literature to suggest that the threats discussed in spy fiction had little or no grounding in reality. Authors, it is often said, were spinning mysteries out of airy nothings, so motivated were they by commercial gains. Yet such a

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