Round the List

I have a confession to make. Not long ago I joined an indie music group on Facebook. At first it was an opportunity to reminisce over neglected Britpop B-sides or impress people with the fact that I’d heard of The Jasmine Minks, but after a while it was the heated arguments about genre and canon that became both hilariously petty and horribly addictive. Group members would set out inflexible rules for what bands, scenes and albums should be regarded as properly indie that rivalled the Treaty of Versailles for complexity (and effectiveness). Did indie strictly mean independent or was it a particular sound, style or spirit? What happens to a band deemed indie who move to a major label and make their greatest record? Are they written out of indie-history (or indstory) because they turned their backs on a 4-track recorder and a drummer who was permanently out of time? Such disputes are of course completely pointless yet kinda fun at the same time. The use of the term alternative rather tha...

High profile cases such as the chemical poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal, the unmasking of Anna Chapman as a Russian agent and the whistleblowing activities of Edward Snowden have kept spycraft in the headlines in the twenty-first century. But the heady days of wartime resistance and Cold War espionage are the true Golden Age of spying, and the thirty (well, technically thirty one) individuals featured in this chronological list all lived thrilling lives of intrigue, deception and almost unimaginable danger. From the glamour of Mata Hari to the greed of Aldrich Ames, and from the resilience of Odette Sansom to the ruthlessness of Markus Wolf, here is a selection of the twentieth century’s most fascinating spies and spymasters. YEVNO AZEF (1869-1918) By the turn of the twentieth century, Yevno Azef had risen through the ranks of a number of high profile European revolutionary organisations, taking charge of the combat wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 190...