Spies, Murder and Justice in Northern Ireland...

What happens when Britain fights the Cold War with typewriters, fake pamphlets, covert publishers, and even pretend hippies? On this episode of Spybrary's Cold War Spy Files, Shane Whaley talks with historian Rory Cormac about his book Fakers: A Top Secret Tale of Phantoms and Fo ...  Show more

I'm Shane Whaley — a self-confessed "guile over guns" spy fiction reader who has always preferred le Carré's slow burn spy novels to military firefights. So what happens when a Le Carré fan picks up Jack Carr's Cry Havoc, a 550-page Vietnam War action thriller written by a former ...  Show more

After the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson and the signing of the polarising Anglo-Irish Treaty, how did the bombastic Battle of the Four Courts break out in Dublin? With British guns opening fire on the building, how long did the men of the IRA hold out? What was the outcome of ...  Show more

In the spring of 1540 Thomas Cromwell was at the height of his power, but just a few months later he found himself at the scaffold on Tower Hill preparing to be executed for treason and heresy. What had gone so badly wrong for Henry VIII's right-hand man? As the BBC drama Wolf Ha ...  Show more

He was a rogue Republican who was thrown out of the IRA, had a brief dalliance with the INLA and someone who lurched around other dissident groupings as an enforcer and a feared hitman known for a love of violence but who couldn’t be managed or controlled.

This week ...

Welcome to hell. The true story of Scotland’s notorious serial killers, Burke and Hare.

Mary Paterson is 18 when she meets William Burke in a drinking dive in Edinburgh’s Old Town in 1828. By the end of the day she will be dead and her body sold for £10 to one of the c ...