Book review

Anyone reading this review will know a few fundamentals of the Smileyverse: spymaster George Smiley is podgy, spectacled, middle-aged, soft-spoken, wears ill-fitting clothes, can vanish in a crowd and is routinely cuckolded by his wife over the course of all “his” novels. Thanks to the success of John le Carré’s novels about him, the Smiley canon is now (we might assume) unchangeable: so, making a virtue of necessity, novelist Nick Harkaway has gone back to his Golden Age. Karla’s Choice opens in 1963, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the era when the Berlin Wall went up, the aftermath of Suez, the “candle-end days” of Empire. In East Berlin, a charismatic young man is carted away by the Stasi.

In May 1942, Agent Zo was in the home stretch after a long and risky mission that had placed her in Berlin, at the heart of Nazi Germany. As usual, she picked up a small stone and threw it at the second-floor window of her sister’s apartment in a grimy industrial city in occupied Poland, south of Warsaw. But no one in the flat turned on a light, the agreed signal. She threw another. Nothing happened. With a mounting sense of unease, she knocked at the door of a first-floor apartment, and a pallid face appeared. The terrified neighbor told her that the Gestapo had appeared two days ago and arrested the occupants. “Get away, by God. They are here!” she urged.

What people tend to forget about Jesus Christ is that he killed children. As a five-year-old, Jesus was toddling through a village when a small boy ran past, knocking his shoulder. Taking it like any five-year-old would, Jesus shouted after him "you shall not go further on your way," at which point the boy fell down dead. Later, when the boy’s parents admonished Joseph and Mary for failing to raise their son properly, Jesus blinded them. Something to bear in mind next time you ask yourself: "What would Jesus do?" If this story is unfamiliar, that is because it doesn’t appear in any of the Bible’s traditional Gospels.

An unusual disclaimer greets the reader on the title page of this memoir of an actor chiefly known for starring as the lovable goofball Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV sitcom Seinfeld. “Neither the US Army nor any other component of the Department of Defense has approved, endorsed, or authorized this book,” it notes. But in the event the Pentagon probably needn’t have worried. Drafted into the army in 1970, the actor in question, Michael Richards, seems to have avoided any Sergeant Bilko-like shenanigans and instead separated from the service with a heightened appreciation for the punctuality, discipline and meticulous preparation that characterized his later career.

Commentary on the young Romantics can be curiously puritanical. Not on saintly John Keats, who died too young to cause any trouble. But Byron and Shelley? Beastly to women, negligent as parents, destructive as friends, oblivious to their own privilege. Feminist observers tend to resemble the English visitors to Geneva in 1816 who borrowed telescopes to spy on the renegade inhabitants of the Villa Diodati across the lake, hoping to be scandalized. A central character in the summer that saw the birth of Frankenstein was the only non-writer of the villa’s gathering, Byron’s young lover and Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

Ten years ago David Cameron, as the British prime minister, pledged $65 million for the centenary of World War One. The focus was on “capturing our national spirit in every corner of the country, something that says something about who we are as a people.” Beyond a celebration of the Tommy on the Western Front and a belated acknowledgement of colonial Britain’s sacrifice, it was a missed opportunity. There was little attempt to better understand the region where the war began — and where, according to Nick Lloyd’s exhaustive The Eastern Front, it never really ended.

On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union. Over the next four months, the Wehrmacht blasted through the Soviet defenses, taking millions prisoner and destroying thousands of tanks. By early December, German scouts were purportedly within site of the Kremlin. Even though the Wehrmacht was forced back from the gates of Moscow by the Red Army, the renewed German offensive in spring 1942 threatened to deliver the coup de grâce to the Soviet Union. That it didn’t was due to an unlikely alliance between British prime minister Winston Churchill, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Four-star Marine General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie headed US Central Command — CENTCOM, covering the Middle East — from spring 2019 until spring 2022. It was an eventful, and stressful, three years: taking out long-time Islamic State head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019, then notorious Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in early 2020 and overseeing the disastrous final withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Prior to CENTCOM, McKenzie had spent four years in two top-level Joint Chiefs staff posts, and before that he served multiple tours of duty on the ground in Afghanistan. As a younger officer he had been in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 77 hit; he was commissioned in the Marine Corps right out of the Citadel in 1979.