tall-in-the-land-of-stories

Eco in the darkness

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 10:37:48 +0100

Eco in the Darkness

Umberto Eco, he of inter alia The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, Travels in Hyper-Reality and How to Travel with a Salmon, is curating an exhibition of lists at the Louvre in Paris. What a splendid notion from a simply splendid person, a real-life, honest-to-goodness intellectual in a time of mental dwarves.

Lists, he says, are the way humans construct order out of chaos. It is the way they make sense of a perplexing world and a method of understanding the inexplicability of life and other humans.

I may be paraphrasing him a bit, just a smidgeon, but this would be my humble understanding of the great man’s thinking here. I cannot vouch for his thoughts on the missionary position, one-ply versus two-ply toilet paper (though any sane person would be able to deduce that with some clarity), David Icke’s sanity, or whether the moon ever feels lonely, but of this I am sure. Certainly lists are vitally important. They are tools without which we are unable to make our way in the world. Indeed, not to murder other people it is necessary daily to draw up a list of reasons not to, not least of which would be lists of ways of getting rid of all the bodies, which is really rather tricky when you think about it. I have spent some time cogitating on same, and making lists which are promptly destroyed lest they fall into the hands of people who will fail to understand the true context and spirit in which they were made and report me to the authorities. So I have found that I cannot, for instance and strictly in context you understand, bury them in our garden – it’s too small for the number of victims, and our dog will dig them up. And I daresay there’s nothing quite as off-putting as relaxing with a nice cold beer of an evening only to find your quadruped best friend entering the house with someone’s foot in her mouth.

As the electricity has just gone off (again) and the UPS is beeping at me while I hurriedly finish typing this, gnashing my teeth, I try to find the silver lining in this situation (it’s cheaper than taking Prozac).

(Ehm… er… ah… This may take quite a long time.)

Oh yes, having a bookshop means never having to say: ‘Rats, I forgot to bring a book to work,’ when the power goes out.

Reel Ephemera

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:57:58 +0100

Reel Ephemera

I have to confess, I am not fond of ephemera. This is not a a sentiment that the majority of my colleagues share. My feelings are not popular. However, every now and again, I come across an item which makes me pivot on my axis.

According to Wikipedia, ephemera is defined as
"....transitory written and printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved. The word derives from the Greek, meaning things lasting no more than a day. Some collectible ephemera include advertising trade cards, airsickness bags [yes, airsickness bags this was news to me to, hopefully these are unused items, bearly touched by human hands and throats. Not even Marilyn Monroes' throat would make me feel less queasy about this issue], bookmarks, catalogues, greeting cards, letters, pamphlets, postcards, posters, prospectuses, newspapers, stock certificates, tickets and zines. Decks of personality identification playing cards from the war in Iraq are a recent example of ephemera items which are gaining in popularity with people who are interested in collecting such items.

In library and information science, the term ephemera also describes the class of published single-sheet or single page documents which are meant to be thrown away after one use. This classification excludes simple letters and photographs with no printing on them, which are considered manuscripts or typescripts. Large academic and national libraries and museums may collect, organize, and preserve ephemera as history. A particularly large and important example of such an archive is the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, Oxford."

We have just been offered an unusual item and I have to say, that I am fascinated by it. I have been absorbed for the entire day, pouring over it and researching it.

Above is said item.
Said item relates to the career of one Harry Curry. Mr. Curry appears to have had a rather enviable life. He was also a hoarder of note. The album contains a panorama of Harry's career, roughly between 1925 and 1939, from letters of acceptance into various positions for different film companies around the world including Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures, signed menu cards from events held by these companies, letters received aboard the White Star Line, a radiogram received aboard the "Samaria", Cunard White Star Line, telegrams received aboard the SS Queen Mary, telegrams received from the Union Steamship Company, airline tickets, telegrams received from the Western Union, newspaper clippings about his promotions and all sorts of other titbits. There is even a fold-out map pasted into the album, where he has outlined his journey aboard the T.S.S. “Themistocles”, from Melbourne to South Hampton, where he has had some of the crew members sign the map at the bottom.

The collection is not limited to letters, there are a couple of promotional, publicity cards from stars of the day (one of those being William Powell).

It also includes promotional matter related to publicity for movies that he launched in New Zealand such as “The Vagabond King”, "The Canary Murder Case", and "Maid to Order" (starring Julian Etlinge).

My ghast was flabbered to learn (from the letterheads) that a publicity manager was once known as an "Exploitation Manager". It appears that Harry took his job as an "exploitation manager” quite seriously. There is a newspaper article, “Stunting The Vagabond King”, which details Harry Curry staging

“a unique exploitation stunt.....that not only sent the picture merrily on its way to box-office records, but nearly sent Harry on his way to the place where exploitation men go when they die. It appears that Harry took to the air, heavily laden with handbills announcing the opening of the production......which he intended to drop on the seething masses below. All went well for some time, and the Paramounteer flung out hand-bills with great gusto. Then tragedy! A batch of 'bills caught in the aeroplanes rudder, making control of the machine impossible. As a fitting climax, Harry and the plane made a forced landing in the mud at St. Helier's Bay, none the worse for having introduced the first aerial exploitation stunt in that neck of the woods”.
I did mention that I have been enjoying reading the material, did I not ?

Not only did I learn of "exploitation managers", from these letters and letterheads, but I also learned a wee bit about film industry history. Some of the letterheads are from the "Famous Lasky Film Service" which was an earlier incarnation of "Paramount Pictures".

All these little details of which I had been oblivious. The album also contains bits of British film history in the form of photographs of the UK. Warner Bros. annual conventions and signed invitation forms as well as signed menus from these events. There a few amusing photographs and published caricatures of one Max Milder, who was the head of the London subsidary of Warner Bros., cigar always in hand and in the case of the caricatures of him – nearly eclipsing his head in size.

Mr. Curry clearly had a sense of humour. Whilst aboard the "Orca", he founded this club :

“Ye Jolly Olde Kocktail Klubbe – ye J. O.K.K. Loveth a good Drinker”, the membership card being “not returnable” and admittance being “one bottle as required” and their funds being 'We áint got much money but we sure see life". Under the the rules and regulations we see that the number of drinks per meeeting is described as "as many as you can freeze on to” and “Hoboes not on time to be ostracised. Charming ladies allowed sixty minutes latitude only – this on account of their well known proclivity”

The album also contains a humourous caricature of Mr. Curry captioned "The Social Lion" which appeared in the Paramount Punch, which appears to have been a journal for the trade.

For someone who is an "anti-clutter bug", this was quite an extraordinary object. I am amazed that someone can retain all these pieces, when I find myself in a world where architects appear to be competing to build places of captivity rather than homes, so small are they in size. Letters of appointment and congratulations I can understand as with the movie paraphernia, but the airline tickets, radiograms and telegrams, leave me bewildered, and yet this album captivated me from the start. I read it from cover to cover. It documents an interesting career of an interesting man in an interesting industry, but it doesn't stop there. Although we don't get the personal bumph of christmas letters and birhtday cards, we do get just enough of a view into the mans' life to make the collection interesting and we must remember that this also served as a family document, this was someones father, grandfather, uncle etc. I found the album to be more interesting in many ways than the average collection of ephemera as it is not sterile, but rather somehow alive with someones personality of past.

For those of you whose interest has been piqued with regards to the world of ephemera, go and have a look at The Ephemera Network . And as they say in the classics "That's All Folks!"

Zugzwang, by Ronan Bennett.

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:51:42 +0100

Zugzwang, by Ronan Bennett.

Zugzwang, n.: an obscure move in an even more obscure game commonly thought to have originated in Persia, whereby ritual war is conducted between two parties, sometimes resulting in the loss of bodily fluids, mainly sweat and tears instead of the more usual blood.

This is a novel that has all the elements one would wish for in an intelligent thriller: chess, murder, psychology and revolutionary politics, all set against the backdrop of St. Petersburg, in the year 1914 A.C.E.

This last mentioned may be the best part of the book. Bennett seems to have done his research and his evocation of the time and the place is convincing and, in parts, quite beautiful. So too the atmosphere of the times, the closed-in feeling of history holding its breath, the impending world- altering historical events, all combined with the expectations of the chess tournament taking place in the city, for the crowning of the first Grand Master of chess.
Chess may not be your cup of tea, and the diagrams of the unfolding game between the main protagonist, Dr. Otto Spethman and his violin virtuoso friend, Reuven Moiseyevich Kopelzon, difficult to follow, but the intricacies of the game, the hidden moves and the planning and diabolical cunning involved serve as perfect metaphor for the revolutionary intrigue of the time and place.
Add to this some Freudian sexual repression, a murder or three, a dash of poetry, some snow and vodka and a couple of quite surprisingly steamy sex scenes (Ronan, you old devil you, who knew?) and you have a quite intriguing book.

Ronan Bennett has written several screenplays, the most recent of which is Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp.

And for those of you who imagine novelists to be weedy, uninteresting types, Bennett was incarcerated twice. Once at age 18 when he was accused of taking part in an IRA bank robbery during which a policeman was shot and killed. He was convicted and sent to Long Kesh prison, but released less than a year later due to the flimsiness of the case against him. In 1978 he was held in remand for 16 months, accused of plotting to plant bombs in the UK. He conducted his own defence and was acquitted.

He also holds a Ph.D. in history from King’s College London.

Best quote by Bennett: "Writers should be distrustful of authority," he says. "I think writers should always be in a position of tension in relation to governments and power and authority." NPR

Postcards of the East Africa Campaign

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:53:00 +0100

Postcards of the East Africa Campaign

Sold by us on Http://auctionexplorerbooks.com September, 2009
.

Postcards from the East Africa Campaign (World War I) & St. Helena. - One Album
Description : A collection of vintage postcards in one album.
All of the postcards have been loosely inserted (no glue invloved)

48 x Black and white (including one used, colour one), unused postcards, relating to the East Africa Campaign.
Publisher unknown. I am also not sure if this is a complete series or not.

3 x Black and White post cards in the rear of St. Helena :
Napoleon's House.
Napoleon's Tomb.
The Ladder, St. Helena.

Many loose postcards (some used) of London, Victoria Falls etc..

The East African Campaign was a series of battles and guerrilla actions which started in German East Africa and ultimately impacted portions of Northern Rhodesia, British East Africa, Uganda, and the Belgian Congo. The German colonial forces, led by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, fought for the duration of World War I and surrendered only after that war had ended. - Sourced from Wikipedia.

Saint Helena, is an island of volcanic origin and a British overseas territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. The territory of Saint Helena consists of both the island of Saint Helena, and also the dependencies of Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha.

The island has a history of over 500 years since it was first discovered as an uninhabited island by the Portuguese in 1502. It is Britain's second oldest remaining colony (after Bermuda). Saint Helena is one of the most isolated islands in the world and was for several centuries of vital strategic importance to ships sailing to Europe from Asia and South Africa. For several centuries, the British used the island as a place of exile, most notably for Napoleon Bonaparte, Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo and over 5,000 Boer prisoners - Sourced from Wikipedia.

Tall Stories Makes A Point

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:31:04 +0100

Tall Stories Makes A Point

We are attending the annual Knifemakers Guild of Southern Africa where we are selling books with a fine edge. As we are honed well, things are going swimmingly.

The show takes place over two days every year. This is day two, and we are rearing to go, though tired in manner of canines.

The Thrill of the Thriller

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:26:21 +0100

The thrill of the thriller

There used to be a vacuum in South African fiction, right there on the border between crime fiction and thrillers with contemporary interest. One that needed to be filled with fast-paced, high tension, relevant stories with recognisable, interesting characters set in the roiling society of post-apartheid SA. That gap has been filled by Deon Meyer. At the outset you will discover that he possesses that vital skill authors in these genres need (and often lack) – he makes you want to turn the page. More than that, he makes you race to the end of the page so that you can turn to the next. The phrase ‘edge of the seat tension’ may be hackneyed and in intensive care from over-use, but it was made for him. Not only as regards the plot, (though that is essential), but also regarding the characters and their development. On first reading one of his books I found myself unable to put it down. I cannot remember the last time I read a book in a single sitting, but he forced me to with his skill. He manages to capture the atmosphere of the country and its people with style and wit. In fact, if I have any criticism of his writing style, it is that he does not write enough dialogue as he creates some of the sharpest and wittiest conversations between his characters. Without fail, his characters are interesting and as complex as the plot allows. They are so recognisably human, so defective, scarred, incomplete and prone to making mistakes that they never fail to resonate with the reader, suffering much of the same conditions, circumstances, hopes and failings. His novels are well plotted, structured with care and shows the result of many hours of study. Technical details are handled with a convincing thoroughness and ease that belie painstaking research. Where there are faults (and there are, though few) the cracking pace of the plot makes for an easy exercise in the suspension of disbelief. Some things are hinted at rather than resolved which makes, for me, for quite satisfying reading. Everything need not be spelled out and delivered complete with a nicely tied, frilly bow, life is not like that and fiction should not be either. Some things are left to the imagination, something few other authors care to do. His writing is earthy, expletives leavening the dough of many a page, and more so in dialogue. It is refreshing, and falls naturally on the ear, never once feeling gratuitous or superfluous. Above all he engages an economy of language that enhances rather than detracts from his descriptive passages. The country and the people come alive in his words, making it sheer delight to read. An added advantage for me was to read his novels in the original Afrikaans, a language he wields with formidable grace and power. Dialects and phrases blend beautifully in dialogue and description, carrying you along on a shimmering stream, masking the strong pull of plot-current twisting under the surface.
So far he has written six novels that have been translated into seventeen languages. He has won the prestigious German Krimi Award, two of his books have been filmed as mini-series and the film rights to another have been bought by a U.S. production company.
His official website can be found at:

www.deonmeyer.com

The Weirdness

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:19:04 +0100

The Weirdness

I have just finished reading Christopher Brookmyre's Be My Enemy and it was hugely enjoyable.He is one of the foremost satirical authors in the UK and writes a kind of crime fiction. I say a kind of because he is very hard to classify and label, much in the same way that Iain Banks is. He is often likened to Carl Hiaasen but to my mind is much funnier and subtler. While he normally starts out in a manner that lulls you into thinking that you are confronted with a run-of-the-mill, slightly formulaic English murder story, his plots then twist and turn in commendably devious ways, and he always has a deliciously nasty little surprise in store for the reader. It's one of those moments where you burst out laughing, then clap your hand over your mouth and look guiltily over your shoulder, appalled at what you had just found funny. He has a wonderful sense for titles as well, as my favourite testifies: A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away. Which set me thinking about other, off-beat, titles I really like. Somewhere near the top of the list features Kyril Bonfiglioli's Something Nasty In The Woodshed, closely followed by Tibor Fischer's Don't Read This If You're Stupid, (although I much preferred the content of The Thought Gang). Irvine Welsh is not to be left out with If You Liked School, You'll Love Work... . Haruki Murakami, (with one is tempted to say Oriental inscrutability) produces almost exclusively weird titles, but The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle remains a high-point scorer on the bewildering-the-reader scale.

Mongane Wally Serote - City Johannesburg

Sat, 30 May 2009 10:37:00 +0100

Mongane Wally Serote - City Johannesburg

This is one of my favourite poems. Almost every night I drive home, from Pretoria to Johannesburg along the Ben Schoeman and when I reach the Woodmead interchange, I think of the Wally Serotes’ “neon flowers”.

City Johannesburg - Mongane Wally Serote

This way I salute you:
My hand pulses to my back trousers pocket
Or into my inner jacket pocket
For my pass, my life,
Jo'burg City.
My hand like a starved snake rears my pockets
For my thin, ever lean wallet,
While my stomach groans a friendly smile to hunger,
Jo'burg City.
My stomach also devours coppers and papers
Don't you know?
Jo'burg City, I salute you;
When I run out, or roar in a bus to you,
I leave behind me, my love,
My comic houses and people, my dongas and my ever whirling dust,
My death
That's so related to me as a wink to the eye.
Jo'burg City
I travel on your black and white and roboted roads
Through your thick iron breath that you inhale
At six in the morning and exhale from five noon.
Jo'burg City
That is the time when I come to you,
When your neon flowers flaunt from your electrical wind,
That is the time when I leave you,
When your neon flowers flaunt their way through the falling darkness
On your cement trees.
And as I go back, to my love,
My dongas, my dust, my people, my death,
Where death lurks in the dark like a blade in the flesh,
I can feel your roots, anchoring your might, my feebleness
In my flesh, in my mind, in my blood,
And everything about you says it, That, that is all you need of me.
Jo'burg City, Johannesburg,
Listen when I tell you,
There is no fun, nothing, in it,
When you leave the women and men with such frozen expressions,
Expressions that have tears like furrows of soil erosion,
Jo'burg City, you are dry like death,
Jo'burg City, Johannesburg, Jo'burg City.

Mongane Wally Serote (1944-) is a South African poet and writer. He was born in Sophiatown, Johannesburg. He attended school in Alexandra where the political conditions of the day lent themselves to him becoming involved in the Black Consciousness movement. and the anti-apartheid struggles of the day. During this period he was linked to a group known as the "township" or "Soweto" poets, and his poems often expressed themes of political activism, the development of black identity, as well as images of resistance. When he left school, Serote began working as a journalist. In 1969 he was arrested by the apartheid government under the Terrorism Act and spent nine months in solitary confinement, before being released without charge. His first volume of verse, Yakhal'inkomo was published in 1972 and in 1973 he won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for Poetry and the following year, he was granted a Fulbright Scholarship and travelled to Columbia University where in 1979 he completed a master’s degree in Fine Arts. He then entered a period in his life, where he was exiled from South Africa. Initially he lived in Gaborone, Botswana , where he continued his resistance against apartheid, largely through the Medu Arts Ensemble. Medu was formed in Botswana in 1977 by South African exiles who included, amongst others, artists such as Thami Mnyele. They saw their aesthetic and cultural approaches as rooted in South African resistance and sought to uphold and affirm African culture, building upon the work of cultural organisations such as Staffrider (which was barely a year old in 1978). From Botswana he moved to London where he worked for the African National Congress and after his return to South Africa in 1990, he headed the Department of Art and Culture for them.
In 1981 he published a novel, To Every Birth Its Blood and in 1993, he won the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. In 2004, he received the Pablo Neruda award from the Chilean government and more recently the South African government has awarded him the Order of Ikhamanga in silver for his contribution to literature with an emphasis on poetry

Sources :

http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/orders_list.asp?show=382
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongane_Wally_Serote
http://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/15331/Mongane-Wally-Serote.html

Just Unpacked ! Memorandum : a story of painting by Marlene van Niekerk & Adriaan van Zyl

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:00:08 +0100

Just Unpacked ! Memorandum : a story of painting by Marlene van Niekerk & Adriaan van Zyl

We have just unpacked copies of Memorandum : a story with paintings by Marlene van Niekerk & Adriaan van Zyl.

In this unique book, the text and visual images offer parallel narratives that resonate poignantly with each other. Adriaan van Zyl's series of more than 20 paintings portrays a patient's experience from waiting room to ward giving a quietly disturbing view of the soullessness of hospitals in general. Marlene van Niekerk's accompanying story is a narrative by JP Wiid, a lonely man who is diagnosed with cancer of the liver just before his retirement. The night before a scheduled operation he starts writing a "memorandum" about an experience he had during his first stay at the hospital - sharing a ward with two enigmatic men in a state of postnarcotic euphoria, he overheard their strange conversation, one which was to have a profound effect on his life. He writes how, in the ensuing four months, he becomes a regular visitor to the library, anxious to learn more about the diverse concepts he had been exposed to for the first time. Everything new which Wiid learns about the world comforts him and helps him to accept his fate. Most importantly he makes a friend for the first time - an eccentric but very helpful librarian. While writing the memorandum, Wiid makes a life-changing decision - not to have the operation the next day. He chooses instead to make the rest of his life worth living by filling it with knowledge about cultures, structures, histories, literature and music. In the process he discovers his true self - and his true vocation.

Hardcover, 136 pages ISBN-13: 978-0-7981-4730-9 published November 2006, by Human & Rousseau.

Published Price : ZAR 265.00

TALL STORIES PRICE : ZAR 165.00 (approximately Euros 13. 00)

Who is Marlene van Niekerk ?

Marlene van Niekerk is a South African author who is best known for her award-winning novels Triomf and Agaat. Her graphic and controversial descriptions of a poor Afrikaner family in Johannesburg brought her to the forefront of a post-apartheid society, still struggling to come to terms with all the changes in South Africa.

She was born on 10 November 1954, on the farm Tygerhoek near Caledon in the Western Cape, South Africa. She studied Languages and Philosophy at Stellenbosch University where she obtained an MA. In 1979 she moved to Germany and from 1980 - 1985 she continued her studies of philosophy in the Netherlands where she obtained a Doctorate. She is now professor at the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, at the University of Stellenbosch.

Triomf (translated by Leon de Kock) was a New York Times Notable Book, 2004, won the CNA Literary Award, and M-Net Prize in South Africa and the prestigious Noma Award, the first Afrikaans novel to do so. The film adaptation, directed by Michael Raeburn, won the Best South African Film Award at the Durban International Film Festival, 2008. The equally well-awarded Agaat ( Sunday Times Prize Literary Prize 2007 and Hertzog Prize 2007) was translated as The Way of the Women by Michiel Heyns, who won the Sol Plaatje Award for his translation.

Sources :

http://www.ukzn.ac.za/

http://www.wikipedia.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/BOOKVideoSA

Christopher’s Ghosts, by Charles McCarry

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:51:25 +0100

Christopher’s Ghosts, by Charles McCarry

This fascination with spy novels may pass soon, or it may not. I’m not making any apologies or taking any bets. Not really. I seem to be more powerfully attracted to good spy fiction as time goes by, as I age. (Or decay, depending on your level of compassion or charity). It’s like one of those exercises you would find in a magazine, edited by someone who took one undergraduate course of psychology, where you are asked to share with someone you know something about yourself that they do not know. I would have to come up with something like: had I been a student in Germany in the early Seventies, I would have been a member of Baader-Meinhoff.

I choose not to elaborate on this.

This novel’s perspective is that of the cousins on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean. An American take on the Cold War, as it were or: Across the Pond, with a View. It starts in pre-war Germany and ends in Cold War Europe. We meet the protagonist, Paul Christopher, in the Germany of 1939. He is the teenage son of a slightly eccentric American father and an aristocratic German mother. The family is the subject of close scrutiny by the Nazi Security apparatus, who are deeply suspicious of them. With good reason as it turns out, as they are helping people escape the country. The plot is leavened by love and lust, as life usually is. Reinhard Heidrich lusts after his mother, and he is in love with an girl who is politically undesirable because her grandfather had been born Jewish. The instrument of their persecution is a suitably sinister Gestapo officer called Major Franz Stutzer. Things go badly wrong. People die, disappear, are tortured and abused, and the Second World War starts and ends. The rest of the narrative takes place in 1959. Christopher is a seasoned CIA agent, tough, resourceful and out for revenge. When he learns that Stutzer is still alive, he hunts him down and meets out his reward.A satisfying plot with enough intrigue to keep you turning the pages. What makes it memorable though is the depth of the characters and vivid descriptions of locale. The atmosphere is well crafted and the juxtaposition of the old and the new world deftly handled. A worn out Europe suffers as the playing field of forces it has little control over. In it the Americans stride, confident and capable, but not entirely sure how to take on an enemy that scares them on a deeply ideological level. The East Bloc of the 50’s is dour and dank, but with the lingering memory of more splendid times, as if the memory of the good times has not entirely faded, has not been entirely subsumed by the dreariness of the dreams of grey men with limited understanding of Marx and Lenin, as if they had read the back cover of the book without having opened the text, and decided to build a society on that knowledge. More than the mere plot, the novel delves into the importance of history, both personal and political. How we come to be where we are, and how we rationalise our acts in terms of the past are important themes, intelligently handled. We are shaped by our pasts, but we may choose to use that in different ways. In short, we are not the slaves of our pasts, and though we may act according to its dictates, we may choose not to. Charles McCarry is a retired CIA officer who, we are told, operated under deep cover in Europe during the Cold War. His knowledge of that stand-off, of that place and people and way of thinking, certainly bears that out. He has written nine novels and has been translate into twenty languages. In the spy novel genre he is one of the more worthwhile authors.

Read one of his books - you won’t be sorry.