The definitive biography of the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

A wealthy playboy, incorrigible womaniser and dedicated gambler, Dusko Popov was one of Germany's most trusted spies, one of Britain's most successful double agents, and, some say, the inspiration for James Bond.

With full access to FBI and MI5 records, along with private family papers, his incredible adventures can now be told authoritatively for the first time. Recruited by the Abwehr in 1940, 27-year-old Popov immediately offered his services to the British. His codename was Tricycle.

Throughout the war he fed the Germans with a constant stream of military 'intelligence', all vetted by MI5, and came to be viewed as their most important and reliable agent in Britain. But when he was ordered by the Abwehr to the United States to report on the defences at Pearl Harbour, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, failed to heed his warnings, distrusting all spies and detesting Popov in particular, whom he considered to be a 'moral degenerate'. Facing the danger of exposure, arrest and execution on a daily basis, Tricycle went on to build up a network known as the Yugoslav Ring, which not only fed a stream of false information to Berlin but also supplied vital intelligence to the allies on German rocketry, strategy and security.

After the war Dusko Popov was granted British citizenship and awarded an OBE. The presentation was made, appropriately, in the cocktail bar at the Ritz. Codename Tricycle is a gripping and colourful portrait of a celebrated, glamorous, and daring double-agent who epitomised everything we associate with the life of the spy.

ISBN: 0 436 21023 1

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Compiled from interviews, diaries, letters and contemporaneous first-person accounts - many never before published - this oral history follows the adventures of the courageous men and women who volunteered for service with Britain's Special Operations Executives and the United States' Office of Strategic Services. They parachuted behind enemy lines, often alone, with orders to cause mayhem. Arrest almost always resulted in torture and imprisonment; sometimes in execution. In occupied France, equipped with false identities, they played a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Gestapo; in the Balkans they discovered that the fiery politics of the region were as dangerous as the enemy; in the Burmese jungle they led native marauders in surprise attacks against the Japanese.
Supported by a team of back-room boffins who dreamed up ingenious devices like exploding rats and invisible ink, the special agents of World War Two really were a breed apart. This is their extraordinary story, in their own words.

ISBN: 0 7126 6736 9

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This book is a biography of Magnum, told largely in the words of its photographers. It offers a unique perspective on half a century of world history from an extraordinary group of men and women who were front line witnesses at virtually every major event in the last fifty years. Wars, famines, natural disasters, social, political and environmental crises…Magnum photographers were there. The agency has been inextricably linked with world events from its founding in the penthouse restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947 to the present day. Magnum photographers have been acute observers of the human condition, photographing the richest people in the world, the poorest, the least known and the most celebrated, from Marilyn Monroe to Che Guevara, JFK to Nelson Mandela, Picasso to Kruschev.

This is multi-layered story. At one level, it tells how a small group of photographers - among them Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger - came together, established and nurtured a cooperative photographic agency that has survived against all the odds to become the most famous in the world. At a second level it is the story of the photographers themselves, a wonderfully disparate, colourful and sometimes temperamental group of men and women with little in common except photography and profound concern for their work. At another level it is the richly anecdotal story of their adventures around the world, their feelings about, and reactions to their assignments.

This is a book not so much about photography - Magnum is well served by such books - as about photographers.

ISBN: 0 436 20373 1

June 1994 is the 50th anniversay of D-Day - one of the great events of World War II in which British, American and Commonwealth troops all participated. The planning was extraordinary, the fighting ferocious. This book recalls these historic events.