the YouTube Spies! A lot of what glamorous Anna Chapman's colleagues allegedly got up to – "infiltrating" the neighbourhood and "going to cocktail parties and the PTA" – is what even the most slovenly middle-class English mum would regard as entry-level "networking" in a new neighbourhood. They grow hydrangeas! They hold barbecues! They're just like us! They're. For the internet age, these suburban Russian agents (and where is more suburban than Montclair, New Jersey?) are the spies next door. John le Carré's Smiley answers the introspective self-doubt of the tortured 1970s.
Ian Fleming's 007 reflects the shameless and slightly desperate hedonism of postwar Britain. The citizens of the Republic, who live in their "shining city on the hill", are just as vulnerable to scare stories about "spy rings", especially when the "spies" appear to take orders from Moscow.Ī good spy story should hold up a mirror to contemporary society. The US may be a global superpower, but its instinctive, default position is the kind of isolationism that nourishes the "Red menace" and "Un-American Activities".
Island Britain will always be prey to insular paranoia, but our American cousins share an appetite for national jeopardy. Last week's headlines – "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "A Russian Spy at Annabel's" – are perhaps more plausibly connected to some kind of reality, but still seem every bit as farcical as the fabrications of Le Queux, who believed he was writing for "everyone who has the welfare of the British Empire at heart".
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