Enemies: A History of the FBI, By Tim Weiner

This sister volume to Weiner's devastating Legacy of Ashes, about the CIA, is inevitably dominated by J Edgar Hoover, a weirdly manipulative master of surveillance but not kinked. His alleged cross-dressing is "almost certainly false".

The fiefdom he dominated for 48 years steadily ossified – the protesters of the Sixties were seen as old-style Commies.

In a cheering turnabout, current FBI director Robert Mueller confronted George W Bush after 9/11 when the President proposed an eavesdropping programme that "resurrected Cold War tactics with 21st- century technology".