
A hidden network of 17th-century female spies (2019) - pepys
https://www.historytoday.com/reviews/can-you-keep-secret
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jpfr
Nice! I was wondering before whether Eliza, the 17th century spy girl from
Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle", was inspired by historical examples. It
seems that was the case.

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Hokusai
> In this scintillating book, Nadine Akkerman demonstrates that women were
> unlikely to be suspected as intelligencers and, if unmasked, were usually
> treated more leniently than men.

This reminds me a passage from "Homage to Catalonia" from George Orwell:

"My wife was lying in bed all the while; obviously there might have been half
a dozen sub-machine-guns under the mattress, not to mention a library of
Trotskyist documents under the pillow. Yet the detectives made no move to
touch the bed, never even looked underneath it. I cannot believe that this is
a regular feature of the Ogpu routine. One must remember that the police were
almost entirely under Communist control, and these men were probably Communist
Party members themselves. But they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman
out of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently
dropped, making the whole search meaningless."

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lostlogin
That book has an account going over the top in trench warfare and also
describes bayoneting someone. It’s bad enough reading it, let alone being
there. An independent account of what Blair was like post war would be
interesting.

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pjc50
PTSD? Hard to tell; it would have been endemic at that time between and after
the two great wars. You can detect traces of it in his later work; more
directly, having encountered actual Stalinists in Catalonia he became a
committed anti-Communist while remaining a socialist, an important political
distinction which it is hard for some modern readers to understand.

Orwell would have seen trauma before Catalonia, during his time as a colonial
policeman in Burma. "Shooting an Elephant"
[https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_el...](https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_eleph)
gives a taste of that. (obvious content warning applies)

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vondur
The Parliamentarians in the English Civil War had a pretty solid intelligence
operation going. Far better than the Royalists could muster.

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_jahh
[http://archive.is/TxXO3](http://archive.is/TxXO3)

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dang
We took the word 'hidden' out of the title, since an unhidden network of spies
would be oxymoronic.

Squeezing out title redundancies like that feels like refactoring code.

Edit: alright you guys, I defer to the panel of 4 and have hidden it again.

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juliendorra
Hidden, from reading the review, here refers to the historical perspective:
male spies were known and written about, but female spies have been kept
hidden by historians not looking until this book.

