Interesting People

A Perfect Spy (BBC 1987)
An adaptation of the Le Carré book, and unusually for Le Carré I could follow what was going on the whole time. It helps that it wasn't particularly twisty as plots go, and it was really a psychological exploration of Magnus Pym, where he comes from and how his relationship with his father made him into a perfect spy and then into a double agent, rather than complicated spy shenanigans as such. And it did this very well, with a slow steady journey through Magnus's life from start to end. Also it was devastatingly slashy: Axel and Magnus were just absurdly in love with each other and the show absolutely leaned into this far more than I would have expected for something made in 1987. Poppy and Sir Magnus, my poor heart. I shall have to read the book.

The German Secret Service, Walter Nicolai
This was a fascinating piece of history. Walter Nicolai was the head of German military intelligence during World War I, and he published this book in 1924 about his work. And it's an intensely, hilariously biased narrative, also full of Nicolai's fairly predictable prejudices. The way Nicolai tells it, WW1 was just not playing fair and the virtuous, noble, honourable Germans had everyone else ganging up on them in a very mean way for no reason at all and when Germans wanted to do things honourably and properly they had to contend with everyone else cheating and making unfair kinds of war with trenches and blockades which cruelly prevented the Germans from doing what they were good at and winning outright. But along with all that is a really comprehensive overview of the entire German intelligence system and also the various Entente Powers' intelligence systems and how they interacted. Nicolai lays out the different theatres of the intelligence aspects of WW1 in Europe - he doesn't go into the wider world elements - and discusses the differences between the Russian, British, French, Belgian and American intelligence networks and what they focused on and where they operated, and the measures he took to counter them. He focuses more on this than on how the German system was operating, for all that it claims to be a book about the German secret service it's more a book about catching enemy spies than about what German spies were up to, though he does talk a lot about how difficult it was to get spies out of Germany anyway when there were hostile countries on all sides. But I spent a lot of time laughing at how he kept turning absolutely everything into a propaganda argument for how much better Germans are than everyone else, even things like the significant number of Germans who were induced to spy on their own country he makes into a virtue by carefully explaining that these German traitors were utterly faithful to their new masters, loyal and reliable and provided really valuable intel and didn't ask for large sums of payment, and so as well as being the best at everything else, they were also the best double agents!

A Company of Swans, Eva Ibbotson
Harriet Morton runs away from her oppressive bigoted father and miserly aunt to join a ballet company going on tour up the Amazon river to the newly prosperous Brazilian city of Manaus. Like all the other Ibbotsons I've read, once I'd started this it whisked me along to the end without really drawing breath, it's a delightful experience to read. The characters are gorgeous, the romance is lovely, the descriptions of Harriet blossoming in her new life are a joy and the whole thing was a tremendous ride. I did find the various misunderstandings a trifle contrived, Ibbotson is quite fond of the sort of misunderstandings that cause total disaster for the characters but could have been averted with ten seconds of conversation - though she did lampshade it a bit with the Romeo and Juliet feather motif - but I loved the characters and narrative voice and the storytelling overall so much that I just rolled my eyes at those parts and carried on happily anyway.

Magic Flutes, Eva Ibbotson
In the aftermath of WW1, an Austrian princess is working backstage at the opera while her elderly aunts arrange the sale of their castle to a fantastically wealthy English industrialist, who wants to impress the woman he still loves despite the fact that she previously turned him down for being too poor and unknown. Lots of fun here, with the opera company being fantastically, hilariously and vividly described, the elderly aunts are an utter joy, and of course everyone nearly ends up married to the wrong person before a bit of subterfuge sorts it all out.

A Song for Summer, Eva Ibbotson
This one was particularly good. Ellen, raised by three determined suffragettes, unfortunately enjoys cooking more than attempting to train in a profession, so she swaps university for cooking college and then takes a job as matron of an experimental school in Austria in 1938. Here she takes on a deeply chaotic school full of troubled children whose wealthy parents don't want them around, with all of Ibbotson's usual fantastic characters, and also the mysterious groundsman Marek who is pruning trees and looking after animals in between disappearing on mysterious jobs into Nazi Germany, and refusing to participate in any music whatsoever. I won't spoil the plot, but Ibbotson doesn't follow the strict romance novel rules of the other books quite so much here and I really liked how it all worked out.

Death On Ice, R.O. Thorpe
A fun contemporary murder mystery with a Golden Age vibe. Our heroes are twins, both marine biologists, who are going on a joint luxury cruise/scientific expedition to the Arctic, when one of their shipmates turns up messily dead. The Arctic luxury cruise ship recreates all the best things about a traditional country house murder mystery, with the structured formality, enforced interaction and fancy settings, and this very much had the country house mystery feel to it. The plot was a bit involved in places, but the story overall was great fun, the characters were well drawn and I did not figure out whodunnit before the reveal - though unfortunately I also did not have the 'oh, OF COURSE' sense you get in a really well constructed murder mystery. Still, I'd definitely read another of this series, and I believe there is one, so that's all to the good.