The Unsleeping Eye

by Robert Stove

ISBN 1 876631 35 X

$32.00

Publication date: April 2002

Many books have been written about spies, but few about secret police. Robert Stove tells the story of Elizabeth I's Walsingham, Napoleon's Fouche, and the secret police chiefs of the Russian tsars, Lenin and Stalin, and Hitler. The book finishes with J Edgar Hoover.

The interest lies in the strange personalities of these chiefs, who built their organisations and shaped them according to their own warped personalities. This book is distinguished, apart from its subject, by the fact that Stove is a witty and very fine writer.