The History of Terrorism
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Social sciences
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Historiography
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Historians by country of study
Historians of Australia
Robin Winks
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1776-Today Phi Beta Kappa Society
1868-Today Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS)
1876-Today Johns Hopkins University (JHU)
1884-Today American Historical Association (AHA)
1907-Today Organization of American Historians (OAH)
1934-Today Berkeley College (Yale University)
1939-Today Society of American Historians
1945-Today Special Forces Club (SFC)
20th-century American historians
American male non-fiction writers
Athenaeum Club, London
Canadian Historical Association (CHA)
Donner Medal
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Fellows of the Royal Historical Society
Fulbright Scholars
Guggenheim Fellows
Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professors of American History
Historians from Indiana
Historians of Australia
Historians of Canada
Historians of the Central Intelligence Agency
Historians of the Office of Strategic Services
Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professors
Smith-Mundt Fellows
Stimson Grant winners
United States Foreign Service personnel
Yale University faculty
Children
''Cloak & Dagger'' emerged out of a desire to combine his interests in history and detective fiction: ''I wanted to write something factual, something that would help me to see to what extent the fiction had any basis in reality.''
''I think possibly one of the reasons students get the notion that I must have worked with intelligence is that I've been to lots of remote places,'' he said.
''In effect, what the historian is doing is seeking out evidence and interrogating that evidence and assessing that evidence, very much in the manner of the figure in detective fiction,'' he said.
1987 ''That is what I always tell the students who ask, but of course what they always say is well, you wouldn't admit it if you were, '' he said in a recent telephone interview from his home in New Haven.
1987 Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (book)
1987 NYT - YALE- A GREAT NURSERY OF SPOOKS
As a historian specializing in the British empire, he sees himself more as a detective than as a spy.
He is also an avid reader of detective and spy fiction. He has written two books on the genre, but he refuses to say if has written any thrillers himself.
In addition to being a frequent traveler, Mr. Winks is a prolific writer (he is the author of seven books and the editor of nine others), a collector of old maps, an outdoorsman and a veteran of the Foreign Service.
In his second chapter, on research and analysis in the O.S.S., Mr. Winks makes the point that the whole tradition of area studies was influenced by the requirements of the intelligence community.
Instead, Mr. Winks suggests, these spies were the champions of a ''sentimental imperialism,'' missionaries dedicated to improving the world. He implies that there have been worse causes, and no doubt that is true.
Mr. Winks draws a careful and sympathetic portrait of that subtle and paranoid man. He does not resolve the all-important question of whether Mr. Angleton's conviction that the C.I.A. was penetrated by a deep-burrowing Soviet mole was a delusion or not.
Mr. Winks, who is 56 years old, gained this curious reputation long before he started his latest book, ''Cloak & Gown,'' which investigates the intimate relationship between Yale and American intelligence agencies.
Robin W. Winks, the master of Yale University's Berkeley College and the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History there, is not now, and never was, a spy.