The Secret Agent’s Bedside Reader: A Compendium of Spy Writing

Espionage fact and fiction collide in this thrilling anthology, where you’ll find some of the greatest spy stories ever written alongside genuine agent reports and instructions that changed the course of history.

Daring wartime plans devised by Ian Fleming that could have come straight from the pages of a Bond novel are followed by the first appearance of John le Carre’s George Smiley. Reports from Cambridge spies Kim Philby and Guy Burgess to Moscow Centre are seen alongside literary classics by Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham. Genuine instructions to agents on how to tail a suspect or how to stay alive inside wartime Germany are interspersed with tales of derring-do inside Bolshevik Russia from Paul Dukes and Sidney Reilly, the original Ace of Spies.

With an expert introduction to each extract, former intelligence officer Michael Smith deftly uses his own experience, and that of his many contributors, to take us on a fascinating journey inside both the real and the imagined world of espionage.