The first Cold War thriller I ever read – before MacLean, before Le Carre, before Clancy – was Biggles Buries a Hatchet , from 1958, in which James Bigglesworth MC, DSO, of the Air Police, heads for Siberia to spring his nemesis Von Stalhein from a Soviet prison camp. The wily old German had first crossed swords with our hero in aerial combat over the Western Front, later thrown his lot in with the Nazis, and then deftly switched sides to serve the Communist Bloc after the second world war, but had run out of luck and been sent to the gulag after a falling out with his new masters. I must have been about ten or 11, and was just beginning to get a handle on what had been at stake in the great ideological struggle of the late twentieth century (which had then only recently concluded).

The

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