Espionage

An Oxford spy ring is finally uncovered

2 March 2024 9:00 am

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

14 October 2023 9:00 am

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

30 September 2023 9:00 am

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

9 September 2023 9:00 am

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

12 August 2023 9:00 am

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

8 July 2023 9:00 am

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

15 October 2022 9:00 am

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

23 July 2022 9:00 am

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

18 June 2022 9:00 am

‘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

14 May 2022 9:00 am

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

23 October 2021 9:00 am

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

16 October 2021 9:00 am

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?

31 July 2021 9:00 am

Craig Brown describes his various encounters with the MP who notoriously faked his own death in 1974

The great betrayal of Ethel Rosenberg

19 June 2021 9:00 am

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

15 May 2021 9:00 am

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

20 February 2021 9:00 am

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

31 October 2020 9:00 am

John le Carré once wrote sadly that he felt ‘shifty’ about his contribution to the glamorisation of the spying business.…

Behind the veil of secrecy: GCHQ emerges from the shadows

17 October 2020 9:00 am

The brilliance of GCHQ can now be recognised – and about time too, says Sinclair McKay

The Pearl Harbor fiasco need never have happened

24 January 2020 10:00 pm

It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when…

Klaus Fuchs after his release from prison in 1959

How Klaus Fuchs’s treachery may have averted Armageddon

27 July 2019 9:00 am

When Klaus Fuchs started passing atomic secrets to the KGB, he changed the course of world events. Forget about Philby…

At the Tropicana nightclub: Dr Hasselbacher and Wormald celebrate with Milly on her 17th birthday. A scene from Carol Reed’s film of Our Man in Havana with Burl Ives, Alec Guinness and Jo Morrow

‘Where every vice was permissible’: Graham Greene’s Cuba

6 April 2019 9:00 am

Cuba meant a lot to Graham Greene. Behind his writing desk in his flat in Antibes he had a painting…

US Attorney General William Barr

Is Barr really helping Trump by slowing the release of the Mueller report?

5 April 2019 3:09 am

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

13 October 2018 9:00 am

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

24 February 2018 9:00 am

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

9 September 2017 9:00 am

If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…