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Dreamscape has been releasing new audio versions of le Carre‘s work narrated by Simon Vance and they are wonderful. I‘m a huge fan of both le Carre and Simon Vance, so this was a comfort reread/listen for me. TSWCIFTC is the quintessential Cold War spy novel and it‘s the book that cemented le Carre as the master of the genre.

Fantastic non fiction about spies and counter intelligence from the UK and Russia during the cold war. Interesting and fast paced, I didn‘t want to stop listening. I will be thinking about this piece of history for a long time-I never would have imagined that crisps and nap pies could play such a key role in espionage. Highly recommended on #audio.

There is this gentleman that comes in almost everyday and plays the same machines at my casino. He‘s a Navy veteran who worked on submarines. He lent me 2 books and this is one of them. Was it on my 2025 bingo card to read about life on a 1960s submarine mission? No, but here we are. And as someone who has never read about submarine navy life I found it fascinating. I wouldn‘t say this is narrative but slice of life. Pick!

Published in 1980, only four years after Belenko's escape from Russia (and well before the fall of the Berlin Wall), this book was quite fascinating. Belenko actually had more or less the ideal situation in Russia as the MiG-25 pilots were highly valued and treated well (by Soviet standards). Reading about his slow recognition of the cognitive dissonance between what he was being taught about his country vs the west and what he could actually ⬇

While I was in Berlin, I met a British tour guide who referenced this specific book as a great introduction to the advent and dissolution of East Germany or the German Democratic Republic. Funny enough, I was already reading it. Hoyer does a particularly nice job with the format relating individual experiences of citizens of various locales, backgrounds, industries, dissenters and true believers and builds the historical narrative off this device.

The concise history of the GDR covers the time leading up to the building of the Wall and ending in 1990. Hoyer aims to show the reader what life in the GDR was like - including welfare state, home and family, popular culture and foreign relations -while also focusing on key figures such as Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and head of Stasi, Erich Mielke. When it comes to women‘s equality, the GDR was one step ahead of the west: women were working

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This was a quicker listen than I expected. I started it a few days ago, but when I got back to it today I listened straight through to the end. I‘m not much of a reader of espionage novels, but I appreciated the tangle of events and explanations this one explored. I‘ll definitely be interested in picking up another of Le Carré‘s novels.

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