Espionage

Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they blend two elements of the genre that are rarely seen together. First, they are grounded in a wholly plausible version of the intelligence community, where decisions evolve in Whitehall committee rooms and the wiles of politicians and bureaucrats are just as important as the machinations of moles. Secondly, their central characters often recall an older tradition of gentlemen patriots that goes back to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay. The combination shouldn’t work but in Judd’s novels it does. These elements meet in the character of Charles Thoroughgood, who has already appeared

With two new biographies of Kim Philby out, an espionage drama by Sir David Hare on BBC2, and the recent revelation that the aristocrat superspy John Bingham was the model for George Smiley, there is little doubt that Britain is currently going through one of its fitful bouts of spy fever, and this book can only add to the excitement. Philby has a walk-on role in Jason Webster’s gripping and stylish new account of the extraordinary career of Juan Pujol, aka Agent Garbo — and a multiplicity of other monikers — arguably the second world war’s most successful double agent apart from Philby himself. Pujol first crossed British Intelligence radar

The story of Kim Philby is, of course, like so many English stories, really one of social class. He was one of the most scandalous traitors in history, and from within the security services sent specific information to the Soviets during the early years of the Cold War that resulted directly in the deaths of thousands of men and women. Among them were the Albanian guerrillas, hoping to liberate their country, who found Soviet-sponsored troops waiting at their landing places to shoot them. A list of non-communist opposers to the Nazis in Germany was passed on to the Russians who, advancing into Germany in the last years of the war,

The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling outraged and a bit duped. I have no doubt that they would sympathise with poor deceived Ellen North in Dorothy Whipple’s brilliant 1950s novel Someone at a Distance. ‘Ellen was that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife’, who works herself to the bone to make a cheerful home for her children and indolent, self-satisfied husband, Avery. When Avery’s mother employs a young French companion — the vain and poisonous Louise Lanier — we sense that Ellen may not be a happy housewife for long. Louise wants to get away from her

To the French, Albion’s expertise in perfidy will come as no surprise. But centuries of warfare have given them time to learn. With their experience only dating back to 1914, the Germans clearly found it difficult to grasp during the second world war that nowhere is the truth more expertly and instinctively spun than in the land of the gentleman. While a schoolchild soon masters the lie simple, and the lie financial merely requires a degree of brazenness easily developed by proximity to other people’s money, the lie belligerent demands an instinct for dis-simulation that must be bred in the bone of its practitioners to be carried off convincingly.Thus, alongside

Of those caught up in the 1963 Profumo affair, the only winner seems to have been that blithe spirit Mandy Rice-Davies. Everyone else lost. Profumo’s family bore the brunt, of course, especially his son David, archetype of the boy sent crying home from school, who wrote a brilliant book about it, Bringing the House Down (2006). Harold Macmillan and the Conservative party were driven from office. Yevgeny Ivanov was recalled to Russia. Stephen Ward was hounded to death. And poor Christine Keeler… In that mesmerising scene in the film Scandal (1989), where Mandy (played by Bridget Fonda) and Christine (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, as she then was) are getting dressed, to the

The English fascination with spies is gloriously reflected in our literature, from Kim to A Question of Attribution, and while their Egyptian and Israeli counterparts remain untranslated, and the Americans unreadable, English spy novelists rule. Compromised, divided and alienated, the spy is a model modern hero, and the spy’s world, with its furtive and fetishistic arcana, is an admirable theatre of identity, of English attitudes to sex and class, hypocrisy and betrayal. (The best recent spy novel is John Banville’s The Untouchable, which tells the story of Anthony Blunt more freely than Alan Bennett’s play, nudging the facts into outrageous fiction — casting Graham Greene as the villain, for example.)

When in 1909 a 50-year-old retired naval officer, Mansfield Cumming, was asked to set up what became today’s Secret Intelligence Service — better known as MI6— the suggestion that there might one day be an official history would have been unthinkable. When in 1909 a 50-year-old retired naval officer, Mansfield Cumming, was asked to set up what became today’s Secret Intelligence Service — better known as MI6— the suggestion that there might one day be an official history would have been unthinkable. Indeed, for the next 85 years, MI6 had no official peacetime existence, let alone any thought of a history. Cumming later remarked that if ever he published an