Russell Shanks on how SOE-related games suggest skills needed to be a successful SOE operative According to Adam Chapman, videogames offer players the opportunity to embody and play as historical figu...

We are delighted to announce the next event in our online global seminar series. Please join us for an online panel discussion on gendered experiences of the Second World War on Tuesday 8 September fr...

At the end of the Second World War, a wave of independence movements swept the British Empire. Emergency Exits focuses on three often overlooked independence movements. These were brutal conflicts bet...

Ash Percival-Borley visits an important site in SOE history I recently had the opportunity to visit the cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague. My partner is Polish, and after visiting fami...

Ash-Percival Borley on the pioneering wartime intelligence officer and the hidden role of secretaries in the secret war A woman in a tailored burgundy skirt-suit stepped off a bus on Baker Street, Lon...

From histories of the French Revolution, to policing in Early Modern England, to LGBTQ+ histories, these reflections highlight HWJ as a valuable resource across many different classrooms.

A person’s gender does not matter on the battlefield, and history agrees.

The King’s Dinner is about what it meant to be British at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on a large, open dataset of two royal household kitchen ledgers, the authors study the role and inf...

Call for papers: The Hidden Second World War: Cultural Depictions of Irregular Warfare and Covert Action British covert operations of the Second World War have provided source material for a string of...

Call for papers: The Hidden Second World War: Cultural Depictions of Irregular Warfare and Covert Action British covert operations of the Second World War have provided source material for a string of...

Join us at the Weston Library or online for a talk from the curators of the Weston Library’s latest exhibition, John Le Carré: Tradecraft

Russell Shanks chooses the clunkiest SOE-related games Adapting of historical episodes into videogames presents both challenges and opportunities. Scholars such as Adam Chapman and Esther Wright have ...

Guy Woodward explores social media posts by the outgoing head of SIS and considers the fractious wartime relations between the agency and SOE Posting on X in July this year Sir Richard Moore, head of ...

Russell Shanks chooses the best SOE-related games from the past 25 years Among the pantheon of Second World War videogames, special operations and covert action form a prominent subgenre. My research ...

James Smith on the impact of the SOE on post-war spy fiction As Guy Woodward’s last post suggested, a mooted collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and John le Carré on a film addressing treachery and ...

Guy Woodward investigates an unrealised SOE film project Stanley Kubrick was one of the most influential film directors of the twentieth century, responsible for a string of films addressing modern wa...

In the week of VE Day, Matthew Sweet discusses what peace has meant since 1945.

During the Second World War, Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret service established to encourage resistance and carry out sabotage, employed various techniques of enhancing the abi...

YouTube video by Catherine Warr