Liam Ostermann's Reviews > The Spy Who Painted the Queen: The Secret Case Against Philip de László

This is a mendacious book, even its title is mendacious, Philip de Laszlo painted a vast number of queens, not all of them royal, and even managed to paint the late queen Elizabeth II as a six year old but what relevance that has to anything to with spying is hard to see. But of course mixing royalty and spies does help the sale of bad books.

The problem with this book is the lack of context, there isn't a whisper of the virulently bigoted, antisemitic, nativist campaigns that took place throughout WWI that concentrated on finding 'spies' and 'traitors' in high places. To get a feeling of the really nasty nature of this hysteria read 'Wilde's Last Stand' by Philip Hoare.

Philip de Laszlo was as much a spy as Mata Hari, but not being female or actress (though as an artist he wasn't that much more respectable), he was railroaded into a dawn execution. That the author, Phil Tomaselli has a high opinion of revolting creatures like Basil Thompson and William le Queux says everything about his knowledge of spying in WWI.

Unfortunately Tomaselli is of a breed of amateur historians, particularly ones who scour intelligence files, who don't understand that spy services, like computers, are only as good as the information they are supplied with. Garbage in, garbage out, should, must remain forefront when dealing with old spy 'denunciations' or 'investigations'.

That Tomaselli also conflates the problems of the spy services in WWI with the problems of spy services tackling 'the war on terror' is both ahistorical but deeply troubling for anyone with doubts about the 'intelligence' which led to events like the shooting of Jean Charles de Menzes in London in 2005.

This book is a long smear campaign against de Laszlo but worse a pat-on-the-back for Britain's intelligence services since WWI. Since the a uthor doesn't know Russian, or how to do the most basic research, it is unsurprising that what he says about Alexis Ignatiev, the imperial Russian military attache in Paris during WWI is so hopelessly confused and wrong.

This is the sort of book that is actually worse because of its pretence at scholarship and should be avoided like the plague.