Title: Notorious
Subtitle: History's Villains and Why They Matter
Author: English, Otto
Published by: Headline
Year: 2026
First published: Headline Welbeck Non-Fiction, 2025
Date reviewed: 09.26
ISBN: 978 1 0354 2033 9
Otto English is the publishing pseudonym of Andrew Scott

In the same vein as his previous books ‘Fake Heroes’ and ‘Fake History’, English shows us that however much we may think we know about people and events in the past, what we know as ‘history’ is almost always at best a simplification and at worst downright untrue. In ‘Notorious’ he tells some stories we have forgotten, or were never told, or which have been erased from our common history.

The book tells us about witches, Barbary pirates, Spanish ‘flu and the very pointy shoes popular in the 14th and 15th centuries. The people English has researched and now presents to us in detail range from Vlad ‘the Impaler’ and Wat Tyler, via the Illuminati to Nicolae Ceaușescu and Al Capone.

In the final chapter called ‘Erased’ English writes about times that are still within living memory, specifically the events leading up to and during the Second World War. He tells the story of Harold Cole, a sergeant in the Royal Engineers, who became the most wanted British traitor in wartime and post-wartime Europe. Playing a double- or triple-agent role and working under multiple aliases, Cole’s actions led to the deaths of dozens or even hundreds of soldiers, airmen, British agents and resistance fighters. But he was a serious embarrassment to the security services, and Cole has been ‘erased’.  These extracts from the concluding paragraphs from the book sum up the theme of the whole book:

Quite swiftly, the story of Harry Cole faded away from the broader public consciousness. […] most war historians essentially engaged in ‘damnatio memoriae’ and his name was erased from the liturgy of events. Postwar Britons preferred the bowdlerised narrative of the plucky nation, made up of heroic ordinary people, standing united and alone [… Cole] was a bad guy without a cause [… a] vicious, unprincipled murderer, traitor and thief. […] So there were no films, no documentaries […].

Which is unfortunate because […] the likes of Cole demonstrate that our past was complicated and messy and that, for the most part, the people in it were no better or more heroic than those in our present.

We live once again in an era of warfare, warped narratives, disinformation and blurred lines […] where very bad people would like us to believe they are the good guys. […] Cole was much more than a traitor. He was worse than that because this con man and thief was able and willing to wreak havoc even as he portrayed himself as the hero of the hour. And there is no greater warning from history than that.