Posted by andy clayton on August 26, 2013 at 08:47:12 user cousin_jack.
Sunday Times book review has a piece about: 'Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game: How British spies thwarted Lenin's plot.' A book by Giles Milton.
''Two of Britain's famous literary spies crop up: Somerset Maughan... and Arthur Ransome, who led an astonishing triple life as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, a confidant of Lenin and a British intelligence agent.''
''Full of novelistic flourishes, this book may be treated with some scepticism by serious historians, but others will find themselves as gripped as they would be by the very best of Flemming or Le Carré.''
I gather the book recounts some of the adventures of the 'gentlemen amateurs' who spied on the new Russian administration in the wake of the revolution.