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Christopher Moran has won the 2014 St Ermin’s Hotel Intelligence Book of the Year Award with Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press).
He was awarded the £3,000 prize at the St James's Park, London hotel last night (Tuesday 29th April) by intelligence expert Nigel West, who chaired the judging panel.
West described the book as "a survey of how successive British governments have exercised censorship and stifled public discussion about the security and intelligence services. Altogether a very impressive, balanced study of what has become a veritable cottage industry of publications that attempt to lift Whitehall's veil of secrecy".
The two other titles short-listed for the 2014 award were Roger Hermiston’s biography of notorious spy George Blake, The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake (Aurum Press), and SIGINT: The Secret History of Signals Intelligence 1914-45 by Peter Matthews (The History Press), an account of what Allied investigators learned postwar about the Nazi equivalent of Bletchley Park.
The St Ermin’s Hotel in St James’s Park, London offers this annual award for the best new intelligence book in recognition of the hotel’s long connection with the British intelligence community. The award is open to all non-fiction titles concerned with the world of intelligence and espionage published in English during the previous year and which, in the opinion of the judges, adds substantially to the published literature.
As well as West, this year’s judges were: literary agent Andrew Lownie; historian Daniel J Mulvenna; British intelligence analyst and lecturer Glenmore Trenearn-Harvey; and author and screenwriter Michael Smith.
Moran is assistant professor in US National Security and a British Academy postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Warwick University.