Spies, organisations and operations from 510 BC to the present are comprehensively detailed in Richard Deacon’s indispensible directory of the underworld of espionage. This absorbing, often disturbing survey contains much new and first-hand material – Spyclopaedia.

          Country by country analysis of establishment intelligence services. spies from the Chinese sage Sun Tzy to today’s state of the art, from pigeon post to satelite spying, from the aristocratic elite of the Ninja to today’s nuclear spies…

          The essential jargon – sinister as in 'demote maximall’ for kill or wry as in 'one man Bay of Pigs’ for an incompetent agent – here is the key to the code, in spy fiction and in practice.