I needed a crash course in the governments involvement in antileft action in California, and solid sources to tell me how Manson could have been swept up in it. I focused on two secret intelligence operations that were under way in Los Angeles in 1969: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. Their primary objective. According to three congressional committees that investigated them in the midseventies, was to discredit the leftwing movement by any means necessary – an aim that, coincidentally or not, described exactly the effect of the Manson murders.

Its about time! this is potentially the best book I have read on ‘The Kingdom’ & delivers a remarkable exposure into this secretive, routinely self-misrepresenting “ultraconservative theocratic autocracy”. With immense finesse & substantive diplomatic tact, author Nicola Sutcliff – & over 28 Saudi women from a vast & varied pool of social positions – render a brilliant intra-exposé.

a massively absorbing series of accounts from beyond the Berlin Wall (the majority of course occurring prior to its 1989 collapse).

Whoa! Initially published in 2015, when Operation Car Wash was blowing its gaskets. Half memoir & all observatory, Extreme City throws wide the unique abhorrence & awesomeness of the beleaguered & siege-stricken prodigy that is Rio, & the greater country of Brazil. This is one of the best & most personal scribes I have streaked on the region (Soares is a carioca – “Rio born & bred”), reclining amongst the likes of Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil & Misha Glenny’s excellent Nemesis.