Working under Covers
Paul Laity
- Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War by Tammy Proctor
New York, 205 pp, US $27.00, June 2003, ISBN 0 8147 6693 5
It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim hordes’ against the British Empire. ‘With her bright hair and the long exquisite oval of her face she looked like some destroying fury of a Norse legend.’ She also has a mesmeric smile, devouring eyes, a cloud of fair hair and ‘a bosom that rose and fell in a kind of sigh’. It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse her interest.’
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[*] Pimlico, 523 pp., £14.99, November 2003, 1 84413 091 6.
[†] Picador, 352 pp., £12.99, November 2003, 0 330 43273 7.