Basically trained as a historian, Noel Annan was still in his early twenties when in 1941 he began a career in British Intelligence that included long service among the famous group of Ultra code-breakers, who played such a key role in the second World War. He paints a remarkable picture of how career academics and scholars were transformed into often acute military analysts whose reading of information, reports by agents, enemy signals, etc., directly affected history. Immediately after the war, Annan was sent to Germany, a country shattered and prostrate and close to starvation and terminal breakdown. Here he got to know the leaders of the new, emerging, postwar Germany, including Konrad Adenauer (whom he found witty, intellectually sophisticated, anti-British and anti-Prussian, a Rhineland patriot and a strong believer in building a new Europe with de Gaulle, his fellow-Catholic). Annan quickly recognised that Russia, previously an ally, was rapidly becoming a potential enemy of the West, and he witnessed at first hand how the Russians fomented trouble for others and were intent on resisting the democratisation of Germany on Western lines. He strongly urged on his own government a more humane policy towards the defeated peoples, with the intention of not driving them into the arms of Stalin, and history has borne him out. His book offers a fascinating inside view of a crucial period in modern history; and after his return home Annan became a successful academic and author, as well as writing the Annan Report on the future of British broadcasting in 1977.