Classified is a fascinating account of the British state's long obsession with secrecy and the ways it sought to prevent information about its secret activities from entering the public domain. Drawing on recently declassified documents, unpublished correspondence and exclusive interviews with key officials and journalists, Christopher Moran pays particular attention to the ways that the press and memoirs have been managed by politicians and spies.
He argues that, by the 1960s, governments had become so concerned with their inability to keep secrets that they increasingly sought to offset damaging leaks with their own micro-managed publications. The book reveals new insights into seminal episodes in British post-war history, including the Suez crisis, the D-Notice Affair and the treachery of the Cambridge spies, identifying a new era of offensive information management, and putting the contemporary battle between secret-keepers, electronic media and digital whistle-blowers into long-term perspective.
Christopher Moran was born in 1982 and raised by the sea in Weymouth, Dorset. He has since become a countryside dweller, having spent the last 13 years at Warwick University, first as a student and now as an Assistant Professor of US National Security in the Department of Politics and International Studies. His research has been funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, and most recently by the British Academy. He is a frequent visitor to the United States for research purposes, and in 2011 was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington DC. He is the author of Classif...
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