How to fight a fascist state – what I learned from a second world war briefing for secret agents | Zoe Williams

You can forget the advice on disguises, secret codes and spreading propaganda by dropping leaflets in train carriages. But there is something for us all here about the need for action

The SOE Syllabus was a series of lectures given to prospective secret agents in Britain during the second world war. These lessons in ungentlemanly warfare" were released from the top secret bit of the Public Record Office (now known as the National Archive) and published as a historical curio in 2001, when my esteemed colleague John Crace picked out the sillier bits in one of his Digested Read reviews. There was a whole lecture about how to craft a disguise, in which people with sticky-out ears were advised to use glue to pin them back.

But now, 24 years later, I have picked up the book with a graver purpose - just on the off-chance that if we end up having to resist a fascist state, the past might have something to offer. They won't know everything, these ungentlemanly gentlemen, being as they didn't have the internet. But they can't have known nothing.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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