The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
It was the usual grey and cold day in Cold War Berlin, November 1973, with the first really cold east winds sweeping in across the flat plains of Eastern Europe that stretch as far as the Urals in the Soviet Union. Thinking about nothing in particular, and about to...
Intelligent, accessible, and entertaining – William Boyd’s Trio was always going to be one of the novels of the year. Boyd is often rightly lauded for his craftsmanship, in relation to the structure and style of his works, but not enough credit is given to him for his...
The two heavily armed carriages rattled slowly into the central square of Tiflis (now known as Tbilisi), the state capital of Georgia. Seated resplendent in one of the carriages was the State Bank’s cashier. The other carriage was packed with police and soldiers....
My book The Happy Traitor began more than 20 years ago when I chanced upon an article in a Dutch magazine. It was by a radio journalist who had interviewed George Blake, a British Dutchman who had started out spying for the British and wound up a KGB double agent. I’d...
That famous photograph is lodged in all our memories – Christine Keeler naked, astride a concealing chair. And perhaps we all have our own background with this story. Ok, my husband Derek Malcolm’s memories are a bit more direct than most. As a young man on the...
What prompted you to choose the period that you wrote your first historical novel in? I set my first novel, Traitor’s Gate, in 1938, just before the Second World War. The Second World War was an epic struggle of good against evil, when the stakes were as high as...
Nuclear Near Misses A couple of years ago I spotted an interesting tweet from Tim Harford, pointing me to an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that told the extraordinary story of a group of missilemen on Okinawa who were ordered to launch their...
Books Click on any of the books covers below to either buy or get more information on Amazon Articles Click on the links below to read the full article [dpdfg_filtergrid custom_query="advanced" use_taxonomy_terms="on" multiple_taxonomies="name_of_author"...
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? I’m careful not to get too trapped in any one period! My particular interest is in individuals – often quite ordinary people - who find themselves cast into an extraordinary situation. I use their story to...
John le Carré may have a few rivals when selecting the greatest novelist of the late 20th century (there are arguments to be made for Graham Greene, Tom Wolfe, and Philip Roth, among others) but he certainly has no superior. Le Carré was not just a chronicler of the...
