Spies and Economics

In one of the later Music of Time novels, Nick Jenkins remarked on the pleasure of re-reading, as you got older. He was right about that. I've REALLY enjoyed, during the last few weeks, re-reading Le Carre's Karla trilogy (I refuse to call it "The Quest for Karla", it's too cheesy).

Herself likes police series: Morse, Rebus, Frost. George Smiley is a lot like them: a dysfunctional personal life, he's subject to moral qualms, he has a complex relationship with authority, he's adored by subordinates...

My head into the spy genre, I read voraciously Agent Zig Zag last week. That was a cracking story - if it had been a novel, one would have thought it too far-fetched. And the astonishing incompetence and sheer weirdness of the Nazi Intelligence service is breath-taking. One of Zig Zag's German minders, a morris-dancing Nazi, allows him to parachute into England with thousands of pounds neatly bundled in paper wrappers with "Reichsbank Berlin" written on them.

Deciding to lay off spies for a bit, now it's Freakonomics that I can't put down.

Comments

  1. MichaelTue Jan 08, 07:57:00 pm GMT

    I re-read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold over Christmas. Fantastic!
    I'm starting on Deighton next. When I'm not doing bloody schemes of work that is.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leech or flatworm? Ants and Swiss Chard

Image
For the 2nd time in a week or so, (1st time regarding dwarf beans ), I'm following Alys Fowler's advice, this time with regard to Swiss chard .  Long story short, after midsummer plants which often bolt if planted in spring will resist the impulse to do so, probably because of shortening days; (I say shortening, but in Glasgow, in July, we're still getting 18 hours of daylight).   I got a packet of Bright Lights , at a good price, (another reason to wait until July before sowing, lots of bargains, I've noticed). But where to sow them? Most of the 2nd bed is under a tarpaulin, but it wasn't quite big enough to cover the whole bed, so the last 5ft or so went under a sheet of plastic, (in the background of the photo in this post, here .) Transparent plastic was a foolish idea, weeds were growing underneath it, so I covered most of it with sheets of metal from the old shed. I decided to leave the tarp, but use the area beneath the plastic for the chard. Who-ah there
Read more

LTPTP XXV: We Shall Overcome

Image
We shall indeed.  It's a lovely wee tune to learn.  I've almost memorized it this morning, the idea being, when I encounter a piano, I want something to sit down and play on the bugger.  I've a feeling that my keyboard's keys are lighter than a proper piano's, and there'll be a bit of effort transferring the skills I've gotten so far.  Probably, at some point this year, I'll be in workplace with a piano.  I'll print off some simple music and scales, and work at it, but it's likely to be in a public place so I want something to avoid making a twat of myself initially. It feels right that this should be the first tune I learn by heart.
Read more

"Chevy Chase. Fuck ever happen to him?"

Image
As Paulie Walnuts said in The Sopranos. It got me thinking. As it happens, he's been working steadily , but you can see what Paulie means. It's like that with film and television actors: you don't see them in anything for a year or two, and you wonder if they're dead or perhaps on a lengthy charlie and booze session. Or maybe doing proper acting on the stage? Only appearing on the telly gives them meaning to us. That video with Paul Simon was on one of the cable music channels the other day. It always makes me smile. As for Paulie and the rest of the crew, the clock's ticking. Of course, America already knows how things finish, but we don't. My mate Ian was telling me about a friend of his, visiting the States a few weeks ago, flicking through the channels in his hotel bedroom, he hit on a repeat of THE final episode, just beginning. What a quandry! He watched it, as it goes, but kept shtum when he came home.
Read more