Spies

Wednesday

Mark Piesing

A skillful retelling of one of World War Two’s most dramatic stories

Around lunchtime on a late September day in 1944, a young woman stepped into one of the most fashionable cafés on the Champs-Élysées. Her eyes still scanned the room for threats, even though her war had been over for many months. Known variously as Suzanne, Madeleine, Blanche, Ginnette or Tony, she had “amassed names and personas just as other women of her years and beauty amassed admirers. And she had amassed those too” in the service of her country. Two such admirers now sat opposite her in the café, and she had to decide which one she was going to spend the rest of her life with, and which she would never see again. Such is the climax of the epic story of love and betrayal that Nahlah Ayed tells, using unpublished interviews and archival and personal documents.

Ayed

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

‘Slow Horses’ is thriller television at its best

It may come as a surprise to anyone who has read Mick Herron’s peerless Slough House novels, but Slow Horses, Apple TV’s high-profile adaptation of the first book in the series, is not funny. Instead, it takes Herron’s uproariously comic premise — that a group of misfit British spies, cast out of MI5 for misdemeanors exaggerated and accurate alike, have been reduced to grubbing about in a grim office on the periphery of the City of London — and plays it almost entirely straight. Gone are the laugh-out-loud one-liners and endearingly witty pieces of throwaway badinage. Instead, we have a big-budget spy thriller, polished and scripted to within an inch of its life. It’s a bit like seeing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reinvented as a gritty urban drama.

horses