A message from Spybrary's John Koenig Spybrarians, some of you know me as much for my tales of hunting for and buying books as anything else. I have a lifelong passion for reading and books, passed along by my father. I cannot remember not being able to read, nor enjoying it. John Koenig with a...
Review by John Koenig. Post-war Berlin is the epicenter of Paul Grant’s third entry in his fine trilogy, Berlin: Uprising. Change is happening in Germany, even after the relentless upsets of World War II and the Russian “liberation” and occupation of Berlin and much of the country. Berlin: Uprising stands on it’s own, but getting your hands on the...
One of the joys of listening to and being involved with the community around the Spybrary podcast has been discovering books I might never have heard of otherwise. Clive Egleton's The Russian Enigma (aka Pandora's Box) is just such an example of that, having been posted about by C.G. Faulkner whom I had the pleasure...
The Intelligence Trail is Spybrary Approved. This was not a freebie either (Brian is Scottish after all.) We paid the retail price and think its worth every penny! Who’s heard of London’s in-depth spy tour, THE INTELLIGENCE TRAIL? Perhaps you’ve listened to Spybrary Episode 24, where Founder and Guide Brian Gray waxed lyrical (well, a...
Philby. Burgess. Maclean. If you're a student of Cold War spies (and if you're at Spybrary there's a decent chance you are), those names will be very familiar. The latter pair's 1951 defection helped to make public the most famous spy scandal of the era. In the decades since, they've also inspired countless works of...
If you're a fan of the spy-fi side of spy fiction chances are you're a fan of The Avengers. With Patrick Macnee as the debonair John Steed alongside fellow agents such as Diana Rigg's Emma Peel, it's become a quintessential piece of 1960s British television. Indeed, the series was part of my teenage years as...
Having read and very much enjoyed The Fever, the opening salvo from Michael Brady's Into The Shadows range, I was eager to dig into the second volume. This one would take the firmly established CIA non-official cover (NOC) officer Michael Brennan to Asia in what seemed to be another tale potentially ripped from the headlines....
Mick Herron and Spybrary Spy Podcast's man in the UK David Craggs Our man in the UK, David Craggs, has been out and about and was lucky enough to have lunch with the UK's top spy master, Mick Herron. Here is his top secret report direct from a table somewhere in Oxford : “After events in...
Could you make the cut as a Cold War Spy? Spybrary Spy Podcast Listener Clarissa Aykroyd reviews her experience of John le Carre's The Circus, a new immersive spy game in London. On Sunday, 9 September I took part in ‘John le Carré’s The Circus’, a real-life spy game devised by...
First appearing nearly thirty-five years ago in the pages of The Hunt For Red October, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is arguably the closest thing to an American James Bond. Not only with a highly successful series of novels but also a trilogy of successful films in the early 1990s. Recently, however, the CIA analyst has...
