Ashenden, or, The British Agent

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The history didn't weigh these pieces down - they were about people living out their lives at a certain time. Jacob Dudman is back in a brand-new box set of Twelfth Doctor Chronicles, due for release in March 2024 from Big Finish Productions. Ashenden is a thinly disguised memoire of Maugham's own period in wartime (1914-1918) secret service work. Miss Satterthwaite always dreamed that the stars were listening to her, and now they're changing her life forever.

When Billy can’t find the informant, he wonders if Kate is secretly harboring her, since the two grew close during Kate's weeks undercover. While describing an agent, nicknamed ‘the Hairless Mexican,’ that Ashenden is asked to accompany to Italy, R remarks that, “he hasn’t had the advantages of a public school education. He is sent to Switzerland where he becomes involved in a number of counter-intelligence operations; these he accomplishes by means of persuasion, bribery, blackmail, or coincidence.You cannot escape it, and should you take pains to guard against it, it will make use of those very pains to trip you up. While spy stories set during World War 2 and during the Cold War have their charms I find the earlier tales set during the First Word War or in the years leading up to that war much more appealing. Maugham was a spy during this war, spending much of his time in Switzerland and it is claimed, had he been in Tzarist Russia 6 months to a year earlier, he might have influenced the Bolshevik Revolution.

It is definitely not the edge-of-your-seat stuff of later spy thrillers in which the work of intelligence gathering often becomes life-threatening business, although Maugham makes crystal clear that there are risks involved in what Ashenden does. His preface is a spirited—although prickly-- defense of the traditional literary concepts of “a beginning, a middle and an end.Many of the recent theological and political tremors that have emanated under the leadership of the Pope have produced a degree of incoherence and uncertainty. Random House presents the audiobook edition of Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, read by Noako Mori. All the stories are good, and four of them really pack a punch (The Hairless Mexican, The Traitor, His Excellency, and Mr Harrington's Washing). Instead, spying is a tough-minded game, played to be won using whichever underhand methods are necessary.