It is a gloomy morning in London, but rain hasn't stopped about 100 international journalists from cramming into a press conference at publisher Penguin. All this for a book? But which one? Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol?
Few would have guessed that The Defence of the Realm, by Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, could have drawn such a crowd. Six years in the writing, the book is more than 1,000 pages long. And yet, in the days following its publication, The Defence of the Realm outsold Brown's latest book on Amazon.
The reason for the book's success is its subject matter. The Defence of the Realm is the first fully authorised history of MI5, the intelligence agency that recently celebrated its centenary. Andrew illuminates some of the darkest corners of recent British history: the Cambridge Five; the Profumo Affair; and 'Death on the rock', when MI5 operations foiled an IRA attack on Gibraltar. The final chapters take the story up to the recent July 7 bombings in London.
Speaking at the press conference, Andrew nominates MI5's attempt to goad Neville Chamberlain into action against Adolph Hitler as his favourite of the agency's actions. Among the tactics MI5 employed was revealing that Hitler privately referred to Chamberlain as an 'arsehole'.
Flanked by Stuart Proffitt, publishing director of Allen Lane Books, and Sir Stephen Lander, MI5's director general from 1996 to 2002, Andrew admits to trepidation at the scale of the project, which began in 2002. After an intensive selection process, he was required to join MI5 and submit to their rigorous background checks.
Andrew then faced the real work of trawling an archive comprising 400,000 folders, which in turn hold several million separate files.