James Crossland

Historian James Crossland talks about the strange, fraught period after Britain had won the First World War – but was bankrupt and beset by enemies, real and imagined. 

Britain entered the 1920s on the brink of collapse: a shattered economy, soaring unemployment, striking workers and mutinous soldiers. Meanwhile in Russia, the Bolsheviks were determined to spread their revolution across the globe, dispatching infiltrators, propagandists and insurgents into Britain and its colonies, chipping away at the war-battered foundations of the world’s largest empire with the aim to destroy it from within.

Crossland charts the secret struggle against these threats in The Afterwar. With a rich cast of dubious heroes – adventurous soldiers, ambitious detectives, paranoid spies, puritanical politicians and violent fascists – he tells the story of the birth of Britain’s secret services. In an era when Russian assassins again operate on British streets, it’s a tale of timely resonance. 

Professor James Crossland is a Reader in International History at Liverpool John Moores University and the author of four books: Rogue Agent: From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare, The Untold Story of Robert Bruce Lockhart; Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939–1945; War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–1914; and The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Terrorism.