Understanding how AI functions is becoming necessary for everyone, from citizens to societal leaders. Citizens’ basic rights and well-being can be affected by AI. Political and business leaders have to make decisions about AI, sometimes involving delicate trade-offs. AI poses two levels of explainability challenges: one is for technical people to understand how neural networks function, and the other is for the wider population to understand AI and what it is capable of.

Intelligence officers working under diplomatic protection are rarely out of the news for long, and the last two years have been no exception. How did the relationship between diplomacy and secret intelligence come about? What was the impact on it of the bureaucratization of secret intelligence that began in the late nineteenth century? Is diplomatic immunity the only reason why intelligence officers still cluster in embassies and consulates today? What do their diplomatic landlords think about their secret tenants and how do the spooks repay the ambassadors for their lodgings? These are among the key questions considered in this historically grounded work on the contemporary interface between diplomacy and secret service. It also has guidance on further reading and contains numerous illustrations.

This book, which rests on extensive use of private papers, official documents, press archives and not least Grenville-Murray’s vast output (including novels), is the first biography of this complex man to be written. It begins with the difficulties produced by his illegitimate birth, and then describes his patronage by Lord Palmerston and Charles Dickens, his colourful diplomatic career, and finally his blossoming as a successful writer in France in the 1870s