Set against the backdrop of a yachting trip to the German coast, the story weds a tale of adventure with the reality of Britain’s imperial overreach thus beginning a genre that – as continued by the likes of Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and John le Carré – has matured into one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the literate world.
Espionage
Erskine Childers and The Riddle of the Sands
by Brett F. Woods
January 27th, 2009
A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré
by Jem Bloomfeld
November 18th, 2008
The violent and crude final pages of the book force us to scrutinise our feelings over the last three hundred pages – did we will this? Are we guilty of this ending, if only by five percent? The brutal inanity of the dialogue is a warning that in Le Carré’s world, we don’t get to argue over the proportions and scale of what we set in motion.
Eugene Debs and the Fight for Free Speech
by Paul Comstock
June 26th, 2008
Debs was the great voice of socialism in the United States for the first two decades of the 20th century, a five-time presidential candidate for a third-party crusade against capitalism. He was a homegrown rebel, born and raised in Indiana, and a powerful speaker who knew how to translate socialism into an American idiom.
Comrade J by Pete Earley
by Jascha Kessler
January 24th, 2008
It was the goings-on, the kleptocracy that emerged, the sheer blatant thuggery of Putin’s entourage, the vandalism and looting that commenced after 1989, related by Tretyakov, that finally discouraged him, a professional through and through and a Russian patriot. The principles that led to his flight into the cloaking arms of the CIA and FBI are suggestive: leaving behind all his property and possessions, amounting to about two million dollars, was worth it because in his view Russia was ruined and things had gone beyond any hope of redemption in his lifetime. He wanted his daughter to grow up a free woman.
Absolute Friends – by John Le Carré
by Paul Blairon
April 10th, 2007
He finished his schooling in England and then moved on to a period of sexually charged radical politics where he met Sasha, a diminutive, hobbled, leftist action junkie who will reappear throughout his life.
Beyond the Balkans – Eric Ambler and the British Espionage Novel, 1936-1940
by Brett F. Woods
March 26th, 2007
Eric Ambler (1909-1998) was one of the foremost architects of espionage fiction as it exists today. Like his predecessor Somerset Maugham, Ambler sought to transform the genre from the verbal banality and minimal characterizations of authors William Le Queux and Edward Oppenheim to a more sophisticated, morally ambiguous world of deception and danger.
The Last Victorian: John Buchan and the Hannay Quartet
by Brett F. Woods
March 26th, 2007
But, even more importantly, he also struck the first modern note in the evolution of the genre with respect to the degree of personal doubt and insecurity that over-shadows the mission – the same note, albeit greatly amplified, that is found in the novels of such well-known successors as Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John Le Carré, whose spy stories may be correctly seen, in part at least, as a continuance of John Buchan and the Hannay Quartet.
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