CIA
Peril in Prague: The Secret of Secrets, by Dan Brown, reviewed
Robert Langdon is pursued by dark forces through labyrinthine alleys as he searches for his abducted girlfriend, who is about to crack the secret of human consciousness
The dangerous charm of Peter Matthiessen
The philandering author of the sublime The Snow Leopard spent a lifetime globe-hopping from the Amazonian jungle to the Siberian tundra at great cost to family life
Perfection: The Rest is Classified reviewed
Interviewing for MI6 sounds to have been even scarier a century ago than it must be today. Candidates would enter…
Rebels and whistleblowers: a choice of recent crime fiction
A veteran CIA officer gets involved in an anti-government movement in Bahrain, and a young British intelligence officer infiltrates a news service
Senior moment
We men all think we’ve still got it, even when we’re well past 50 and young women look straight through…
Joining the dots
‘History,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In…
Cheap thrills
Noël Coward was so right that his words have become a cliché: it is indeed extraordinary how potent cheap music…
The disaster of Vietnam and the men who can’t get over it
Many wars have outsized and enduring effects on the societies that fight them, but for Americans the Vietnam war has…
There’s no substitute for human intelligence
Spying may be one of the two oldest professions, but unlike the other one it has changed quite a lot…
The Plame game
Scooter Libby’s conviction looks ever shakier – and a sign of the deep problem with America’s special prosecutors
Low life
The pub was disappointingly empty, so I took my first pint of the evening upstairs, where some sort of New…
Deep in the heart of darkness
For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with.…
Letter from Paris
Like many journalists, I’m a bit of a know-it-all — when information is touted as ‘new’, especially in government reports,…
The worm turns
Something odd happened between the advance publicity for this book and its printed appearance. Trailed as addressing the troubled history…
Home again
One of the more welcome and surprising things about television at the moment is that Homeland (Channel 4, Sunday) is…
The tyrant and the cloud-dweller
The banning of Dr Zhivago in the Soviet Union had unfortunate consequences for other fine 20th-century Russian novels, says Robert Chandler
Love and betrayal
The title of Charles Cumming’s seventh novel is both a nod to the comfortable polarities of Cold War and also…
The enlightened one
‘Arabist’ is fast becoming an archaism. Perhaps it is already one. These days the word conjures up enchanting visions of…
Jaipur Notebook
In 2004, ten days after I moved my family to a new life in India, I gave a reading at…
Cheaper than chimps
After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what…
