James Bond Tradecraft

You Know My Name: Was James Bond Really A Spy?

James Bond will never have a reputation in the intelligence or spy writer community as being a great spy. He was a secret agent with a license to kill, should he need to use it. This is not to say that Bond does not do any intelligence gathering or was not skilled in counter-intelligence. But…

Field Report: Jeff Quest

We welcome Jeff Quest in from the cold, to discuss his impressive collection of first-edition, signed spy novels. What drew you into collecting spy novels? I’ve always been a reader. I started with kid mysteries before branching out into stories with spies, like Gordon Korman’s “Our Man Weston” and the Hardy boys books. As I got…

Navy Strength: Spies on British Screens come to Plymouth Pt. 1

Plymouth University recently put on a conference exploring how spies and the intelligence community have been represented in British cinema and TV and looked at how these representations impact on our perceptions of the security services. Our man in the field Tom May reports. *** On a mild summery Friday morning, the Spies on British Screens…

Interview with Joseph Oldham; Spying on Spies Conference

We are delighted to welcome Joseph Oldham from the University of Warwick, who is one of the organisers alongside Toby Manning, behind the inaugural ‘Spying on Spies‘ conference at The Shard in London from September 3-5. The conference aims to provide a timely forum for a retrospective discussion of the genre’s development and evolution across multiple…

Ian Fleming’s Legacy: British Spy Fiction

First published on The Trebuchet Britain – it could be argued – invented the archetypal spy novel. Born out of political fears and insecurities during two World Wars and a subsequent Cold War, heroes and anti-heroes were dreamt up by a distinguished line of novelists including Erskine Childers, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Somerset Maugham and Graham…