Espionage
Smoke and mirrors
I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other,…
A phoenix from the ashes
‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’ Albert Einstein’s deft avoidance of the question put to…
The slow horses gather pace
Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it:…
A fine finale
Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by…
The end of the affair
The story of the Cambridge spies has been served up so often that it has become stale — too detailed,…
The man who wasn’t there
Craig Brown describes his various encounters with the MP who notoriously faked his own death in 1974
More sinned against than sinning
Ethel Rosenberg was an exceptional woman. Born with a painful curvature of the spine to a poor family of Jewish…
The first Cambridge spy
For his 15th novel, the espionage writer Alan Judd turns his hand to the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death. The…
The tarnished city on the hill
With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The…
Secret understanding
John le Carré once wrote sadly that he felt ‘shifty’ about his contribution to the glamorisation of the spying business.…
Top-level intelligence
The brilliance of GCHQ can now be recognised – and about time too, says Sinclair McKay
Pacific theatre
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…
The prying game
One of the marks of a good Home Secretary is a healthy wariness of those in authority who come begging…
Escaping the Slough of despond
Most spy novels have a comfortable air of familiarity. We readers can take moles in our stride. We have grown…
A choice of crime novels
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…
Through the eyes of spies
Spying is a branch of philosophy, although you would never guess it from that expression on Daniel Craig’s face. Its…
Lost horizon
Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I…
The end of secrecy
Gordon Corera, best known as the security correspondent for BBC News, somehow finds time to write authoritative, well-researched and readable…
