Ciò nonostante, la mia preferenza va a due racconti, Prima del ricevimento e La moglie del colonnello, che fanno parte della seconda metà della raccolta, i sette dedicati alla “finzione” più che allo “spionaggio”. In Petrograd, Ashenden introduces Harrington to an old flame, Anastasia Alexandrovna, with whom he forms an unlikely friendship. It tries to highlight with accuracy that all espionage work may not be 007 action-packed, but include a lot of clerical monotonous tasks, like observing and reporting.

While I'm not that interested in James Bond or his creator, this work has only increased my newly discovered enthusiasm for Maugham's writing. One Thursday lunchtime the Earth gets unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. There are also memorable sections in some of the others, particularly when Maugham gets on to the theme of doomed passion, which he has a powerful way of describing. Egy olyan furcsa és hihetetlen figura felbukkanása, mint a Csupasz Mexikói, egyáltalán nem irreális a regény terében – a brit titkosszolgálatok alkalmaztak nála groteszkebb figurákat is.It gives a semi-fictional semi-autobiographical (this feature being quite similar to Bulgakov’s ‘A Country Doctor’s Notebook’) account of Maugham’s own experiences as a British Intelligence Officer. The Greatest Secret, the long-awaited major work by Rhonda Byrne, lays out the next quantum leap in a journey that will take the listener beyond the material world and into the spiritual realm, where all possibilities exist.

The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish. The taverna is the only place that Kostas and Defne can meet in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic and chilli peppers, creeping honeysuckle, and in the centre, growing through a cavity in the roof, a fig tree. This book was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s very underrated 1936 film Secret Agent and it’s remarkable just how closely Hitchcock reproduces the tone of the book, with the same mix of black humour and cynicism, of innocence and cold-bloodedness. With the Twelve Days of the celebration of Christmas now behind us, we shift the weight of our attention from celebrating the feast to living the feast.London has been infiltrated - a darkness is spreading from the bombsites to the highest ranks of government. Some are just stereotyped 'funny foreigners' - for instance the title character in 'The Hairless Mexican', who wrongly thinks he is irresistible to women and never washes. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) while reading Tan Twan Eng's historical fiction The House of Doors (2023) where the author is shown in 1921 Penang, Malaya gathering real life stories which were later fictionalized into the short story collection The Casuarina Tree (1926). Ami tulajdonképpen szakmai követelmény nála, hiszen civilben író a szentem, de kitör az első világháború, a haza pedig szolgálni hívja, berukkol tehát hírszerzőnek*.