The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain
RICHARD NORTON-TAYLOR
(I.B. TAURIS, 352 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The role played by security and ­espionage in the British state has long held a fascination, not least for Catholics who over centuries have played their part as victims and participants. “There is less danger in fearing too much than too little,” advised the Queen’s spymaster Francis Walsingham as he terrorised Catholics in Elizabethan times.

One of the great Catholic authors of the twentieth century, Graham Greene, drew his literary imagination and his theology from his work with secret intelligence. Greene is among countless authors who have explored the values and morality of what is somewhat inaccurately referred to as “the oldest ­profession”. While not exactly excusing his one-time fellow MI6 colleague Kim Philby’s betrayal of King and Country, Greene ­controversially tried to explain it, drawing on the memory of Catholics in Elizabethan England to describe the Soviet spy’s chilling confidence “in the correctness of his judgement, the logical fanaticism of a man who, having found a faith, is not going to lose it”.