Question 7 by Richard Flanagan won last year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and is a seamless combination of memoir, history, science and ethics. It connects Flanagan’s father’s experience of being a prisoner of war in Japan (which also inspired his Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North) with 1930s nuclear physicists, an affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, the colonial history of Tasmania, and Flanagan’s near-death experience in a kayaking accident in his early 20s, while the title of the book is taken from Anton Chekhov’s exam question parody. This combination of topics probably doesn’t sound very coherent, and some parts are very cerebral and meandering, but Flanagan blends them into a truly unique and poignant piece of non-fiction about the absurdity of life and its consequences. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Ben Macintyre
Books I Read in June 2025
Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre and Shadow State by Luke Harding
Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre is an account of the life of Ursula Kuczynski, born to a German Jewish family in 1907 who later became a Communist spy codenamed Sonya. She moved to Shanghai with her architect husband Rudi in 1930 and was recruited by Richard Sorge at the end of that year when she was six months pregnant with her first child. Over the next two decades, she rose to the rank of colonel in the Red Army, lived in Poland, Switzerland and the Cotswolds in England, contributed towards a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and was later the handler of the Manhattan Project nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and influencing the path of the Cold War. Her spy career was so successful that her request to take early retirement was granted – an exceptionally rare honour. Continue reading
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A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
After reading two excellent novels in recent months about Soviet spies recruited at Cambridge University – Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan and Red Joan by Jennie Rooney – I was intrigued by Ben Macintyre’s biography of Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five spies recruited by Arnold Deutsch in the mid-1930s. Philby worked for Britain’s secret intelligence service (SIS or MI6) during the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War before his activities as a double agent for the NKVD and KGB were finally uncovered in 1963.
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