Book review

That there’s a direct correlation between sex and spying is probably Ian Fleming’s fault. Hard to think of Bond without thinking about his women. For Charlotte Bingham, though, the connection occurred at a deeper level. When her father, John — legendary spook, long believed to be the model for George Smiley — called her into his study to reveal that he worked for MI5, she was terrified that he was about to explain the facts of life, many of which had already been revealed to her by a friend on Bognor beach: ‘I thought I was going to pass out with the horror of what was to come.’ But the

Powerful memoirs by such eloquent doctors as Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Henry Marsh, Gabriel Weston and Paul Kalanithi have whipped the bed curtains open on a previously secretive profession. Steeped as medicine is in uncomfortable facts about debilitating illness, pain and the stress of treating intractable conditions, it was a subject ripe for exposure. Under the Knife and Anaesthesia admit to the fallibility of medicine and the responsibilities, flaws and complex emotions of its practitioners. Arnold van de Laar does not rely on personal experience. Instead, he explores the world of surgery through 28 clinical conditions; its historical scope makes for a fascinating book. Did you know that when Louis

I saw a biopic about Morecambe and Wise recently. The actors impersonating the comedians were not a patch on the originals — how could they be? You need a genius to play a genius. I often wonder if my own HBO Peter Sellers movie would have been improved if someone fiery, of the calibre of Gary Oldman or Sacha Baron Cohen, had been cast instead of Geoffrey Rush, who was muffled under prosthetic make-up. But my point is, biopics seldom come off, and nor do biographies. Indeed, it is a reprehensible and misguided genre. Privacy is violated, creative achievements are explained away, and great men and women are unmasked as

The British diplomat Robert Vansittart had been warning against Nazism for years, so it was a surprise when he and his wife showed up in Berlin for a two-week ‘holiday’ during the 1936 Olympics. ‘Van’ was impressed by German organisation. ‘These tense, intense people are going to make us look like a C nation,’ he wrote in a confidential report. The anti-appeaser had meetings with Hitler and the principal henchmen, and took a particular shine to Goebbels: ‘a limping, eloquent, slip of a Jacobin… My wife and I liked him and his wife at once.’ Van even came to think he might have misjudged the Nazis, though a lapse by

There has been much debate recently about what exactly constitutes ‘literary’ fiction. If the term means beguiling, gorgeously crafted novels that are assured of their place alongside other writers, reacting to, and taking pleasure in discussing them; that are aware of the world’s events and their impact on humanity; that have delicately drawn characters; and that range with ease from intense emotions to moments of high drama; and that use careful, subtle imagery, then C. K. Stead’s The Necessary Angel is all this and more. His previous novel, Risk, touched upon banking and Iraq, but was never overwhelmed by them. In this latest, Max, a lecturer from New Zealand living

Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating the present. In a new collection of short stories by the veteran sf author M. John Harrison, lurid visions of aliens and spaceships play second fiddle to melancholic snapshots of plodding suburbia. Many of the tales in You Should Come With Me Now (Comma Press, £9.99) are set in leafy south-west London, amid the banality of modest affluence: from Putney to Chiswick, Twickenham and St Margarets, and along ‘the endless heartbreaking sweep of the A3 to the sea’. In ‘Cicisbeo’, a husband ensconces himself in his loft, and will only