Espionage
The lure of the spy novel
Anniversaries. Back in mid-December 1998, 26 years ago to the month, we wrapped my first (and probably only) feature film…
South Asia in a time of the breaking of nations
Avinash Paliwal’s gripping tale of espionage opens in 1949, with newly independent India, Pakistan and Burma racked by rivalries in one of the most intricately partitioned areas on Earth
The ambassador’s daughter bent on betrayal
When the young Martha Dodd arrived at the American embassy in Berlin in 1933 she cared nothing about politics. By the time she left four years later, she was a committed Soviet spy
The spy who came back from retirement: Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway, reviewed
Given a new lease of life by John le Carré’s son, George Smiley gets embroiled in a murky affair involving the Circus’s key Stasi asset and a missing Hungarian literary agent
The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce
Stationed in Paris from 1926 to 1940, the wealthy, debonair ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, often seen as a model for James Bond, was also a supremely effective intelligence officer
An accidental spy: Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd, reviewed
Having chanced to interview the Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba shortly before his assassination, a travel writer finds himself targeted by British Intelligence
Cold War spying had much in common with the colonial era
Influenced by Kipling’s Kim, early CIA officers combined a love of overseas adventure with a whiff of imperial paranoia, says Hugh Wilford
The circus provides perfect cover for espionage
As he flew his plane between circus acts across Germany in the 1930s, Cyril Bertram Mills gained vital aerial intelligence about the Nazis’ rearmament programme
An Oxford spy ring is finally uncovered
Charles Beaumont’s warped group, recruited by an eccentric fellow of Jesus College, seems all too plausible. Other thrillers from Celia Walden and Matthew Blake
Keeping a mistress was essential to John le Carré’s success
The novelist himself admitted that his infidelities ‘produced a duality and tension that became a necessary drug for my writing’
The astonishing truth about 007
The world would never be quite the same again after we first glimpsed the casino of Royale-les-Eaux at three in the morning, says Philip Hensher
The forgotten world of female espionage
Many thousands of women acted as messengers, radio operators and double agents behind enemy lines in both world wars. Here, these resilient and resolute pioneers are retrieved from the mists of history
Russia’s long history of smears, sabotage and barefaced lies
Mark Hollingsworth describes how the KGB became the world’s most industrious conspiracy-theory factory, with its agents of influence dedicated to sowing maximum confusion
Espionage dominates the best recent crime fiction
Owen Matthews concludes his magnificent KGB trilogy, and there’s a thrilling debut from David McCloskey, a former CIA Middle East specialist
A complex, driven, unhappy man: the truth about John le Carré
Adam Sisman on the private life of John le Carré, revealed in letters and a kiss-and-tell
A belter of a podcast, featuring a mad South African: Smoke Screen reviewed
I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other,…
Berliners were punished twice – by Hitler and by the Allies
‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’ Albert Einstein’s deft avoidance of the question put to…
Snafu at Slough House: Bad Actors, by Mick Herron, reviewed
Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it:…
A master of spy fiction to the end — John Le Carré’s Silverview reviewed
Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by…
Under deep suspicion in Beirut, Kim Philby still carried on regardless
The story of the Cambridge spies has been served up so often that it has become stale — too detailed,…
The disappearing man: who was the real John Stonehouse?
Craig Brown describes his various encounters with the MP who notoriously faked his own death in 1974
The great betrayal of Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel Rosenberg was an exceptional woman. Born with a painful curvature of the spine to a poor family of Jewish…
The first Cambridge spy: A Fine Madness, by Alan Judd, reviewed
For his 15th novel, the espionage writer Alan Judd turns his hand to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death. The…
CIA spies lose faith
With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The…
Demystifying the world of espionage
John le Carré once wrote sadly that he felt ‘shifty’ about his contribution to the glamorisation of the spying business.…
