Espionage
Behind the veil of secrecy: GCHQ emerges from the shadows
The brilliance of GCHQ can now be recognised – and about time too, says Sinclair McKay
The Pearl Harbor fiasco need never have happened
It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when…
How Klaus Fuchs’s treachery may have averted Armageddon
When Klaus Fuchs started passing atomic secrets to the KGB, he changed the course of world events. Forget about Philby…
‘Where every vice was permissible’: Graham Greene’s Cuba
Cuba meant a lot to Graham Greene. Behind his writing desk in his flat in Antibes he had a painting…
Is Barr really helping Trump by slowing the release of the Mueller report?
Poor Donald Trump. Even Mar-a-Lago may not provide much of a refuge from his cares now that it has been…
Secrets and lies: Berta Isla, by Javier Marías, reviewed
A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most…
The body count piles up in Mick Herron’s London Rules
The well-written spy novel is not a hotly contested field. Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, a few Greenes, and that’s largely…
A blast from the past
If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…
Yes, let our spies spy – but not our bureaucrats
One of the marks of a good Home Secretary is a healthy wariness of those in authority who come begging…
If you read one spy novel this year, read Real Tigers
Most spy novels have a comfortable air of familiarity. We readers can take moles in our stride. We have grown…
Sins of the past haunt the latest crime fiction
It’s often the case that present-day crimes have their roots in the past. Ian Rankin’s Even Dogs in the Wild…
James Klugmann and Guy Burgess: the wasted lives of spies
Geoff Andrews’s ‘Shadow Man’, James Klugmann, was the talent-spotter, recruiter and mentor of the Cambridge spy ring. From 1962, aged…
Spies in the spotlight
Spying is a branch of philosophy, although you would never guess it from that expression on Daniel Craig’s face. Its…
The story of Sikkim’s last king and queen reads like a fairy tale gone wrong
Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I…
Bletchley Park was decades ahead of Silicon Valley. So what happened?
Gordon Corera, best known as the security correspondent for BBC News, somehow finds time to write authoritative, well-researched and readable…
Turing, Snow White and the poisoned apple
As a young student, the atheist Alan Turing — disorientated with grief over the death of his first love Christopher…
A passion for men and intrigue
Moura Budberg (1892–1974) had an extraordinary life. She was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, and as a young…
The Heckler: why it’s time to kill off James Bond
For fans of the franchise who remain unconvinced by Daniel Craig’s time on her majesty’s secret service, the stories leaking…
Cowboys and Muslims: that’s the new global power struggle, according to the latest great American novel
‘I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.’ When ‘The…
The threat from Russia’s spies has only increased since the fall of Communism
‘No, we must go our own way,’ said Lenin. The whole world knows him as Vladimir, while he was in…
You know something’s up when MI6 moves its head office to Croydon
Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they…
The one-man spy factory who changed history
With two new biographies of Kim Philby out, an espionage drama by Sir David Hare on BBC2, and the recent…
Kim Philby got away with it because he was posh
Kim Philby’s treachery escaped detection for so long through the stupidity and snobbery of the old-boy network surrounding him, says Philip Hensher
By the book: The NSA is behaving like a villain in a 1950s novel
The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling…
