The Conspiracy Theorist (37 page)

THE
END

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Although most of
The Conspiracy Theorist
was written in the summer of 2013—the
Snowden affair, GCHQ
spookery
, the establishment of
the National Crime Agency, Villa beating Arsenal at the Emirates—I have
been interested in the subject for some time.
 
I first came across the Crabb affair in Dominic
Sandbrook’s
elegant history of the period 1956-63,
You’ve Never Had It So Good
(Little,
Brown 2005).
 
After I had written
most of the novel (including the insightful Dr Katherine Persaud) I came across
Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory
Has Shaped Modern History
by David
Aaronovitch
(Jonathan
Cape 2009).
 
This is a great read and
in my view the most thoughtful book on the subject.
 
I also feel a debt of gratitude to John Lewis Gaddis for
The Cold War
(Penguin 2005) and his
portrait of a generation shaped by paranoia; one
we
have more in common with than we think.
 
Of course the rest is due to Wikipedia—Kat Persaud is a
contributor—and the mad, diverse and always contradictory world of the
internet
.
 
There
are many versions of history there.
 

Thanks to Becket’s first readers,
technical advisers and critics:
Railton
and Pam and
Andrew and Henry and Elaine.
 
Any
mistakes have nothing to do with them.
 
As someone once said, there is no such thing as guilt by
association.
 
In
the eyes of the law anyway.

Mark
Raven

2014