Alan Furst is routinely hailed as possibly the greatest living writer of traditional espionage fiction. He sets his books in exotic times and places — this one, for example, recounts stories of the French resistance…

If you had asked me a week ago what I thought of this book, I’d have answered — “It’s much more readable than Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. That’s not what I think now. Writing…

For some time now I have been a student of the decades long secret war between Russian revolutionaries and the tsarist police. (Attentive readers of this website will be aware that my research culminated a…