About this Event
Welcome to a very special afternoon here at Hatchards where, in collaboration with Charles Cumming, we offer you all the delights of espionage in fact, fiction and film.
2 - 3pm Spies in Fact
We are delighted to welcome Mark Dunton discussing The MI5 Archive: Official Secrets - the definitive visual record of the clandestine work carried out by the British Security Service, MI5, from its origins to the modern day. This afternoon we will hear all about never-before-published material on the Siege of Sidney Street, the Cambridge Spy Ring and the Profumo Affair and much more.
3.30 - 4.30pm Spies in Fiction
Here we welcome this afternoon’s collaborator Charles Cumming whose books include the Box 88 series: set in a covert intelligence service that operates in the shadows with no government oversight, the most recent instalment is the exhilarating Icarus 17.
Charles will be leading this conversation with fellow authors Simon Conway and Charlotte Philby.
Heralded a master of the spy fiction genre, Simon Conway is the author of numerous thrillers. His most recent, The British Agent, finds a lone undercover operator on a desperate globe-trotting mission. Caught in a web of politics, terrorism and the war in Ukraine, she risks everything to prevent catastrophe.
Charlotte Philby’s books straddle all of this afternoon’s themes. Her novel Edith and Kim explores how the lives of spy Kim Philby and photographer Edith Tudor-Hart intertwined at the heart of the 20th century, and is now being adapted for the screen. Alongside, she will be discussing her writing process from fact to fiction (and to film!), creating duplicitous characters, as in The End of Summer, and her non-fiction children’s book The Secret Lives of Women Spies.
5.00-6pm Spies in Film
Paul Burke’s extraordinary new book Spies on Screen encompasses a life-long fascination with spies in film, taking in everything from Oscar winners, Nobel laureates, auteurs and real-life spies to the high octane thrills of Bond and Bourne and the calculated cool of mole hunter George Smiley. Paul will be in conversation with Charles Cumming, bringing our afternoon of Spies in Fact, Fiction and Film to a thrilling finale.
We hope you will be able to join us for what promises to be a fascinating afternoon of discussion.
Event venue & nearby stays
Hatchards, 187 Piccadilly, London, United Kingdom
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