The Defence of the Realm revealed by Peter Wright decades before in Spycatcher), as well as noting how many of Wilson's MP's were spying for the Soviet bloc. The book's title was derived from MI5's Latin motto, "Regnum Defende". Historian Keith Jeffery was commissioned to write a similar authorised history on the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) for release in 2010. The book received generally positive reviews from major newspapers. "The Daily Telegraph" called it "magisterial, authoritative, balanced, readable ... full of wry humour and with an eye for the absurd", declaring that "MI5 could not have wanted a better historian than him. This book is
Peter Wright boys in the market town of Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire, followed by St Peter's College at the University of Oxford. Peter Wright was born in 26 Cromwell Road, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, the son of (George) Maurice Wright, who was the Marconi Company's director of research, and one of the founders of signals intelligence during World War I. During the Second World War, Wright worked at the Admiralty's Research Laboratory. In 1946, he began work as a Principal Scientific Officer at the Services Electronics Research Laboratory. According to his own account, his work for the UK intelligence, initially part-time, started in the