The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
At the height of the Cold War in 1958, my parents met in Moscow. They were both working at the British Embassy and their rollercoaster romance was complicated by KGB shadows and rarely being totally alone, even in the apartments they called home. My sister and I grew...
Chasing Shadows In the summer of 2003, I was one of around 1,200 American, British, and Australian intelligence personnel sent to Baghdad to form the Iraq Survey Group (ISG). The task of this unprecedented field intelligence operation was simple: locate the Weapons of...
Who Dares Wins: Ben Macintyre on the Iranian Embassy Siege When members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRFLA) bundled PC Keith Lock into the doorway of 16 Prince’s Gate and captured the Iranian Embassy, taking 26 people hostage,...
Pirate, The Redeemed Detective is the latest of your Inspector Lafarge novels, but we’re now in 1947 and he’s been through much. How has his character changed since The Tortured Detective which starts in 1942? He has certainly been through the wringer, emotionally...
Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale often features as a daring bit-part player in World War II espionage books, but now this extraordinary character takes centre stage in Tim Spicer’s insightful biography. Dunderdale was an iron fist in a velvet glove. He combined charm with...
What the Quiet American Teaches Us “I’m not involved… It had been an article of my creed,” Thomas Fowler boasts in The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s magnificent novel of Western embroilment in 1950s Vietnam. Not involved, Fowler insists, in the Indochina conflict;...
Tim Spicer, many congratulations on the new book. What sort of man was Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale? Suave, sophisticated, multi-lingual, highly intelligent, charming but with a core of steel. You mention he was suave and sophisticated but also ruthless. He...
1920 Odessa Ukraine. The Russian Civil War is at its height, a young British man working for Naval Intelligence picks up a report from one of his agents. The crew of the Russian submarine OUTKA are going to mutiny and throw their officers overboard. He leads a party...
In the years just before the First World War, a boy was growing up in Imperial India. He was obstinate and full of life. Still a toddler, he chatted to the servants in Hindustani. His father nicknamed him Kim, after the spy hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, who could...
On the day Britain declared war on Germany, 3 September 1939, Parliament immediately passed The National Service (Armed Forces) Act. All men aged between 18 and 41 were required to register for service. My grandfather John James Doherty ‘JJ’, a talented linguist,...
