People to watch.(The Unsleeping Eye: A Brief History of Secret Police and their Victims)

The Unsleeping Eye: A Brief History of Secret Police and their Victims, by Robert J. Stove; Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002, $32.

ROBERT J. STOVE, or R.J. Stove, as Quadrant readers may know him, is one of Australia's best and most intelligent writers of non-fiction and review, with a mordant, often savage wit, an extraordinarily rapid grasp of fact and connection, a civilised interest and understanding of both "high" and popular culture, and a sharp, clear style which is a pleasure to read. Mercilessly skewering right and left, he also allows a deep and intuitive sense of human nature to guide his satire and indignation. It is the pharisees and the hypocrites, the spineless and the smug, who are his target, as well as the truly dangerous and predatory.

In this, his second book (his first was Prince of Music, a study of Palestrina), he profiles people who were often all of those things, and whose personal, complex characters were as much a facet of the "service" they ran, as any administrative or historical context might be. Yet he also provides that historical and administrative context in an admirably thorough, clear way, which never lets us forget that the secret police is one of the greatest evils of modern states. Indeed, it is clear that the growth of the modern nation-state is indivisible from the growth of secret police; a truly Faustian bargain. And yet--especially given September 11 and the re-emergence of a new-old enemy--is it a necessary evil?

The book is divided into five sections. The first chapter is on Francis Walsingham and his successor Robert Cecil in, respectively, the Elizabethan and Jacobean secret police. The second is on the emergence of the secret police in France, focusing especially on the truly chilling turncoat and natural secret policeman, Joseph Fouche, who ran surveillance for the Jacobins, for Bonaparte, and for the monarchy. The third looks at the secret police in Tsarist and communist Russia (on which Stove makes the very important point that communism was, in fact, secret police, the two being indissoluble from each other--as he puts it, no domestic surveillance, no Soviet communism). The fourth describes the Nazi secret police; and the fifth and final chapter profiles the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover.

I originally read the chapters in manuscript, and know that Stove had to leave ...