Culture

Since 1903, when Erskine Childers warned of the rising tide of German militarism that preceded the first world war in The Riddle of the Sands, spy fiction has enthralled and chilled its readers by holding a cloudy mirror to the murkier corners of international politics. During the Cold War, John le Carré’s novels were hugely influential in shaping popular perceptions about the private manoeuvres behind the public antics. His books have continued to explore the dark places of the world we live in, their subject matter evolving with the headlines. Agent Running in the Field — an intentionally ambiguous title, no doubt — is le Carré’s 25th novel. The first and most important thing to say is that it’s a cracker.

Double identities have never been rare: Norman French conquered England. Anglo Irish led its armies to victory. German Jews helped create the modern world. Perhaps thinking of the many Germans living in London, and British in Hamburg, Munich and Dresden, Prince Albert’s eldest daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, invented another hybrid: ‘Anglo-Germans’. This new biography of her adored father, Albert: The Man who Saved the Monarchy is, appropriately, an Anglo-German book, written from both English and German sources and perspectives, by an English author who knows Germany well.

In the Chinese zodiac, 2016 was the year of the monkey, a trickster year full of the unhappy and the unexpected for Patti Smith. It starts badly at New Year: ‘Some guy with a greasy ponytail leaned over and puked on my boots.’ Then it gets worse, private tragedies and political shocks drawing Smith into a restive, twilight state: ‘The mischievous monkey, toying with the climate, toying with the coming election, toying with the mind, producing sour sleep or nothing at all.’ She tells us how she ‘skated along the fringe of a dream’ in this — well what exactly is it?

Any Swede old enough to remember knows where they were when their prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated. On 28 February 1986, Palme was walking home from the cinema with his wife when an unknown assailant stepped out from the shadows and shot him. We mourned not just the man, but the death of the nation that Palme personified — a safe place where nobody, not even the prime minister, needed protection. As though to emphasise the inconceivability of the event, the murder investigation became a textbook study of police incompetence. Frustrated by the lack of progress, countless ordinary citizens began to conduct their own inquiries, fuelled by various conspiracy theories. One of the people who caught the ‘Palme bug’ was the late crime writer Stieg Larsson.