The Last Leonardo by Ben Lewis

Apparently, I'm into art now. Walter Isaacson's biography of Leonardo da Vinci - the starting point of that interest - is full of the things that typically bug me about the art world: attempts to put more meaning into pieces than they warrant and mystifying the artist to make their work seem larger than life. However, Isaacson, together with two excellent podcast episodes by Malcolm Gladwell (Dragon Psychology 101 and Hedwig's Lost Van Gogh), succeeded in rousing my interest in the art world and its calculated strangeness. Did you know that much of the world's renaissance art is stowed away in airport warehouses (especially in Switzerland) and used to avoid taxes? Also, did you know that the most expensive painting ever sold, the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, is probably not by the master himself and even if it was, it barely retains any of its original paint?

The Last Leonardo, by art insider Ben Lewis, dives head first into the latter question. The Salvator Mundi, sold to Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi Prince, for a staggering 450 million Euros in 2017, is a portrait of Christ as the saviour of the world. It was "discovered" at a minor auction by two experienced art dealers, who, according to the very extensive legend that already surrounds the painting, could clearly see that beside the obvious overpainting and damage, the piece had an inexplicable charm. They paid around one thousand euros for it in 2005. After extensive efforts to clean and restore the painting, it first sold to a Russian oligarch looking to hide money from an impending divorce settlement and later to the aforementioned Saudis albeit, even then, under mysterious circumstances. As of today, its whereabouts are uncertain.

Lewis tracks the painting from its supposed creation through the centuries. There are possible clues throughout the ages as a "picture of Christ by Leonardo" is catalogued to be in the possession of Charles II, king of England in the 17th century. But, as Lewis deftly shows, art attribution was even more troubled then than it is now. Overzealous dealers tended to attribute studio works to masters and sometimes repair damaged works with less than impressive results. In the same vein, Lewis picks apart much of the evidence that supports the Salvator Mundi's attribution to Leonardo. As he peels back the curtain, there is very little definitively shows it to be an original.

The question remains. What exactly is the Salvator Mundi if not an original Leonardo? According to Lewis, it is a studio piece - a collaborative project by Leonardo's pupils - based on Leonardo's design and, possibly, with some input from the master himself. We know that Leonardo must have been involved in the project, since many of his students have painted versions of the Salvator Mundi and there are a few sketches of it in his notebooks. However, the attempt to elevate the painting to the level of an autograph work seems wishful if not disingenuous.

The Last Leonardo makes for the perfect companion piece to Isaacson's look into da Vinci's whole life. Lewis had unprecedented access to all parties involved, with the obvious exception of the Saudis, including Yves Bouvier, the flamboyant ex-art dealer to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, and the oligarch himself. It's the story of the art market, in its current incarnation, as much as it is the story of the Salvator Mundi. I could go on, there is so much to say about all of these topics - are other Leonardo's misattributed? - but I'll let Lewis be the guide. The Last Leonardo is the quintessential guide to high art today; impressive, well researched and full of intrigue.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Psychologists and sociologists, philosophers and other clever people have come up with hundreds of theories about how people interact, how they fall in love and how they decide who to stick with. Somewhere outside the edges of those theories is what you might call chemistry. It's not always possible to explain away why we love who we love and why we reject someone who might be a perfect match.  Some of the elements are obvious and some are not. Sometimes, an inexplicable force ties you to another person without really showing you why. Normal People taps into that force in an intriguing and perceptive way.

Normal People follows Connell and Marianne from high school to College in Ireland, as they hook up, quarrel, drift apart, drift back together and so on. Connell is athletic, handsome and popular, but harbours a secret love for literature. Marianne, born into wealth, is coquettish but prone to traveling the darker alleys of her mind. Their story is relatable and believable in a way that few novels are. Connell struggles to understand how he feels about Marianne - very much something that young adult men go through - and ends up hurting her. They learn about each other and grow up together and realise that their chemistry is something they only share with each other.

Rooney does a lot with very little. Normal People is positively brief, especially compared to other stories of teenagers growing up (don't drop Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 on your foot). Chapters skip forward in time, offering the reader glimpses of the characters' lives. Rooney knows her craft and offers just enough clues for the reader. For example, Connell's missing father gets barely a nod, even though he might be blamed for many of the son's mistakes. It works brilliantly but for a few passages. Marianne's brother, who bullies and torments Marianne, is given so little time on the page that his actions mostly left me confused. Here a longer format might have helped. 

So what exactly is Normal People? In one corner of the Internet, critics dismiss it as just another piece of "chic-lit"; naive books for young women in the style of Jojo Moyes and other bookstore top 10 staples. Normal People does share many of the genre's tropes. Connell is drawn to literature (can't writers imagine any other profession than their own?), is a top student at Trinity College and is invited to continue his studies in New York. New York as a metaphor for success is as vanilla as it gets. Paris is the city of love, Spanish is the language of lust and New York is the aspiring artist's inevitable destination. Some have mentioned Normal People as a generation defining love story. It obviously isn't. My generation (I'm very much the same age as the protagonists) doesn't care about high literature or write long emails to friends during summer vacations. We browse Instagram, not The Communist Manifesto, miscommunicate over texts and live in a constant state of FOMO (fear of missing out).

Nine times out of ten, the story ends there. A bestselling will-they-or-won't-they isn't a likely place to find graceful storytelling. Yet, there is an inexplicable allure to Normal People. We watched the TV series with my wife, which led to several deep discussions about our relationship and how we'd met. On several occasions, I thought about Normal People before going to bed. There are stylistic and thematic similarities with Hemingway's A Sun Also Rises; the sparseness of the storytelling, the frail inner life of the characters and the uncertain ending. And as with Hemingway, and human chemistry itself, part of Normal People's allure is physical and best left unexplained.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I read The Corrections for the first time ten years ago. I didn’t enjoy it, maybe I didn’t really understand it, so I stashed it away and forgot about it. Epics make for great summer reading so I decided to give it another go, considering I always loved Franzen’s other work, especially Freedom. For whatever reason, I barely remembered any of it. I thought it took place in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, but it concerns itself with the 2000 tech bubble instead. Most of the scenes, and even many of the characters felt completely new. I might as well have read it for the first time now.

The premise feels somewhat conceited - a mid-western family gathers for one last Christmas together - which I still find off-putting. Once you jump in, however, it quickly becomes clear that Christmas is perhaps the least important theme in a book chock-full of late 90s Americana. Enid and Alfred Lambert are the ageing parents of Gary, Chip and Denise. Alfred’s declining health (Parkinson’s and dementia) forces the family to confront lingering conflicts as it prepares for the holiday season. Chip has lost his comfortable academic job after a very ill-advised affair with a student. Gary treats his proto-depression with alcohol and tries to maintain his status as head of his own family. Denise is a higly successful chef but can’t bring herself to live an otherwise normal life.

Chapters run for a hundred pages or so and focus on one family member at a time. Alfred is, perhaps, the most compelling character. A stoic, once handsome man, he’s perpetually misunderstood by his wife and children. Enid married him for the looks and the comfortable income of a mid level executive. Gary can’t see past Alfred’s disease and Chip thinks Alfred disapproves of his career. Yet, the man himself is burdened by a debilitating disease and an introverted personality. His grumpiness and distant demeanor are a reflection of his inner life and not his attitude towards others. In his actions, he is loving and dependable. In his words, he is angry and sometimes confused.

In the end, the correction is inevitable. Denise is fired from her restaurant for seducing the owner’s wife. Chip’s surreal Lithuanian detour comes to an abrupt end, and so on. Each of the Lamberts is forced to reckon with the consequences of delaying and ignoring the inevitable. It’s not unlike a parable. Each of the characters is seduced by greed or power or lust or denial. Their ploys work - Enid forces Alfred on a cruise even as his health deterioirates - for a time. The tension grows, as the reader starts expecting the unforgiving backlash that is sure to follow.

I was most surprised by how topical The Corrections still is. It’s fitting that I thought it took place in 2008. Greed, especially, is ubiquitous as everyone and their neighbor is making money in a rising market. In 2000, the mechanism was technology stocks. In 2008, it was homes. Today, once again, seeing others succeed drives us to reach too far, to take on too much risk and, inescapably, start the clock on another correction.

Samsung Rising by Geoffrey Cain

One of the biggest surprises in Samsung Rising has to do with the nature of Samsung, the company, itself. Samsung is not a traditional (to westerners, at least) conglomerate with a head office, assorted business units and one set of shareholders. It is, in fact, a chaebol, a South Korean multi-industry entity, where individual companies have cross-holdings of shares that are ultimately tied to a controlling family. If it sounds complex, it is. This web of ownership was built with the express intention of keeping control of the company within the Lee family whose patriarch, Lee Byung-chul, founded it in 1938.

Samsung is entwined with the South Korean national identity in much the same way that Nokia used to be in Finland. It accounts for more than ten percent of South Korea's GDP and employs over three hundred thousand people. It is, perhaps, best known for its smartphones today, but it also produces heavy machinery, offers insurance and manages hospitals. Samsung Heavy Industries is the second largest shipyard in the world (right after Hyundai, a hometown rival). It is revered by locals. Mothers want their sons to work for Samsung.

The central theme here is control. When Galaxy Note 7s, advanced mega-smartphones, start exploding in users' hands, Samsung doesn't acknowledge fault. It blames suppliers, delays a recall and, mostly, stays mum. A heavy culture of obedience and top-down management had created a situation, where nobody dared to acknowledge. As airlines started banning the product, Samsung’s management slowly came around and issued a full recall. But what mysterious consortium made the decision in the end? Unfortunately Cain’s access doesn’t extend that far.

Geoffrey Cain is not Korean and, therefore, an outsider. This both benefits and hinders the story. Cain wasn't born into the cult of Samsung, he moved to South Korea as an expat. This makes the story easier to follow. Cain slowly teaches the reader the same things he had to learn about Samsung and its legacy. The company is the source of intense pride, and more recently, scrutiny. The story of Samsung is the story of South Korea's rise from an agricultural society to the world stage. After the second world war, South Korea was poor, even poorer than its northern sibling, and painfully undeveloped. Now, it is a global leader in technology and engineering.

However, as an outsider, Cain doesn't have the same access as a local might. The chaebol are secretive and impenetrable and Cain doesn't enjoy the same kind of insider information as Mike Isaac did for Super Pumped (the Uber expose). Nobody is texting him from clandestine board meetings or sneaking him stolen files. He manages to land a few key interviews, a Lee family relative, a retired top executive, but many of the central players are missing. As a result, Samsung Rising isn't as revealing as some of the other business books featured on this blog (notably the aforementioned Super Pumped and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood).

Cain’s timing is impeccable. Samsung’s current vice chairman, Lee Jae-yong, is on trial at this very moment. He faces charges of bribery - the full charge is too long and bizarre to repeat here, but involves olympic race horses and the South Korean president - and he seems guilty, by all accounts. The plot thickens, though. Lee hardly seems like a criminal mastermind and he definitely isn’t a John Rockefeller or a Masayoshi Son when it comes to business acumen. So the question remains: who is in control? Who is the man behind Samsung’s curtain? It’s a question that Cain leaves unanswered.

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

Earlier, I praised Slow Horses for its tone, humour and characters. Dead Lions continues the story and only improves on the original. Slough House still stands and the slow horses - washed up spies dejected by MI5 - still take care of menial tasks like archiving and background checks. There's Jackson Lamb, the out of shape cold war relic with bad personal hygiene. River Cartwright is as close as the series gets to having a 'straight man'. In Slow Horses he took centre stage and seemed destined to anchor the series. Here, he's merely one of half a dozen spooks, all equally interesting and engaging.

Senior spies at MI5 have made contact with a Russian oligarch who might be willing to spy for the British in exchange for political support. The mission is expedited, a meeting is set up - in what absolutely sounds like The Shard, but is not identified - and the intelligence community salivates in anticipation of the coup of the decade. Yet something is amiss. A retired British spy is found dead on a country bus. A long-disbanded Soviet spy ring may be rearing its head. The synopsis would fit any number of John le Carre's novels, but the result is fresh, funny and exhilarating.

The strangest thing about Dead Lions is that it's almost needlessly short. It could easily be stretched to double its actual length (some 350 pages) without feeling bloated. There's a subplot involving a small village in the Cotswolds that, in itself, would make a full length crime novel. A picturesque town, forgotten by time, home to a a few hundred retired Londoners. Yet, the only clue leads there, to what can't possibly be a dead end. It makes sense to leave the reader wanting more, but I could have easily gotten lost in the relationships of these characters. Here, they operate in pairs, some at Slough House and others in the field. Some, like the newcomer whose name I forgot, seem destined to star in subsequent entries to the series.

The best trick in Herron's arsenal is something that can only be described as an inverse Ocean's Eleven. (Look away now if you ever intend to read Dead Lions). Ocean's Eleven is an elaborate heist movie, where the protagonists trick Casino owners out of their money. The viewer is fooled too, the crux of the plan is hidden until the very end. Dead Lions imagines that scenario from the casino owner's perspective. They must realise that something nefarious is going on. However, they are not privy to the plan and must wait for the crooks to reveal themselves. It's an ingenious way to build suspense. You know you've been had and you desperately try to understand how.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of those books that isn't about finance, Wall Street or bond trading but often makes its way onto lists of books about those very same topics. On the surface, it's a satire and character study set in 1980s New York. Sherman McCoy is an up-and-coming WASP Wall Street trader who, in a series of mishaps and bad decisions, sees his life disintegrate. There is much else at play. The Bonfire of the Vanities is both quaint - in its description of local minorities especially - and oddly prescient. It's also one of the best books I've read in a long time.

It was a wrong number that started it. Sherman, married and a father, mistakenly dials his wife instead of his mistress. This small error ripples across Sherman's life. The self-titled Master of the Universe, head of bond trading at Pierce & Pierce (a Goldman Sachs stand-in perhaps) slowly loses his cool and starts doubting his abilities. This small lapsus triggers a newfound doubt in his mind. Is everything, from his lavish 5th Avenue apartment to his infidelity, really under control? Most importantly, he gets lost driving in the Bronx at night. As Sherman and Maria, his lover, search for an exit ramp, their way is blocked by two black teenagers, who may have it in for them. Maria hits the other with the car but the couple end up escaping. Once the machinery is set in motion, however, it's hard to stop.

Tom Wolfe deftly introduces several main characters whose lives coalesce in the end. Peter Fallow is an English expat and journalist. His alcoholism is on the verge of killing his career, but he lucks into a lead on a juicy story: a hit and run in the Bronx. Tommy Killian is a crafty defence attorney with Irish roots. He eventually picks up the McCoy case. Larry Kramer, an assistant district attorney, barely makes ends meet with the meagre government salary, but he uses his position to woo young female jurors. These actors, among several others, are so well conceived that The Bonfire of the Vanities barely needs a central plot thread. Wolfe originally wrote the story in the style of Charles Dickens: as individually released chapters in a monthly magazine. He needed every chapter to be self-contained and compelling.

Wolfe delights in showing the contradicting behaviours of his characters. Killian dresses in colourful pinstripe suits and showy hats but mutters "Whaddaya, whaddaya" under his breath and happily ventures into the grey areas of law. Kramer puts on a show, flexes his honed muscles and frames himself as the keeper of peace in the Bronx. In a hilarious scene, his pomp and posturing ruin a dinner date. He's so focused on entertaining that he forgets to watch his audience. Everywhere, male insecurity shows up like it's the 2010s.

Some of the chapters drag on - descriptions of laughter at a dinner party or a brief stint in jail - but this enhances the immersion rather than slowing down the narrative. This is by no means a short novel. Wolfe uses that length to its fullest. The Bonfire of the Vanities is a sweeping study of an era of life in New York with its players, its hustlers and its vanguard. The strangest part is how distant the 1980s feels. Some parts of the city were off-limits to the middle class due to the risk of crime. Racial tensions were high, not in an abstract modern way, but in a "there are protesters on our street corner"-way. Italians, Irish and Jews were notable cliques. Just 40 years ago, Americans still identified with their European descendants. Today, I imagine, that kinship is all but forgotten.

On a side note, an ill-advised Hollywood adaptation cast Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy, the aristocratic socialite and financier, and Bruce Willis as Peter Fallow, the British reporter and drunkard. It was directed by Brian De Palma, better known for spy and gangster films like Mission: Impossible. I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds like a trainwreck. By all accounts, it was. Considering the girth of The Bonfire of the Vanities (it's a sturdy 700 pages), perhaps a 10 part Netflix show would do it justice. Who knows? The world certainly hasn't grown tired of finance yet.

Food: The History of Taste by Paul Freedman

Sometimes I pick up books based solely on their covers. Some of those turn out to be much needed departures from my narrow preferences. Others fail to delight. Food: The History of Taste falls in the second category. It's less a non-fiction book than a series of essays by different academics, mostly historians, that explores the history of food. Chapters are arranged in chronological order, from the archaeology of food to modern cuisine, to convey a sense of progress. It quickly becomes evident, however, that in addition to the different subject matter, chapters also differ in style and quality.

Some of the chapters are exquisitely boring. I skipped Chinese and Islamic cuisine completely and skimmed others. The two final chapters - "Dining Out" and "Novelty and Tradition" - are especially painful. They focus on the last 100 or so years of culinary tradition, which I expected to be the most interesting part. Dining Out, for example, is a 30 page explanation of what a restaurant is. Not how restaurants function or how meals are prepared or how menus are designed, but a stoic academic definition that mostly serves as a reference to other academics. It is inadvertently hilarious at times: "Most restaurants do not open for breakfast and those that do specialize to some extent in this meal." and "The clientele of a restaurant come with their friends, sit apart from others, and pay for a specific meal when they are finished". Leave it to academics to find the least interesting angle to a story.

Novelty and Tradition does somewhat better, by focusing on a surprising driver of food innovation. On one hand, chefs and diners look for traditional foods and tastes that match their expectations. Traditionalists follow recipes to the word, fight to protect regional specialties (like parmesan, feta cheese or falukorv) and look to the past for inspiration. On the other, innovators work to add new things to existing cuisines by improvising and appropriating elements from elsewhere. It's a dynamic process. Today's traditionalists started out as innovators. The public is quick to adapt new trends but never loses its appetite for more novelty. Yet, even this chapter is perhaps twice too long. It's also peppered with mind-numbing sentences like: "To discover when and why and which groups welcomed or rejected various food innovations in the post-war period is an ambitious research programme and hardly any actual investigation has been done in this field."

The actual history of food is surprisingly exciting, and you can catch glimpses of that here. Freedman and his co-authors do a good job of highlighting how today's food industry is dominated by companies founded in the 19th century. These companies were often built on the back of a single product. August Oetker (of Dr. Oetker) invented baking powder. Henri Nestle came up with baby formula and later developed an innovative way to mix milk powder with cocoa beans, which set the chocolate industry in motion. These, and other similar stories, illuminate the everyday world in unexpected ways. Considering the breadth of fascinating material, someone must have written an enlightening book on the history of food. This isn't it.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

I almost forgot to write an entry about The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Often, that means that a book was either no good or otherwise inconsequential. In this case, however, I blame the circumstances in which I read it. Our baby was having a hard time sleeping and I would often bring my Kindle with me when I put him to bed. That could take anything from five minutes to two hours so, for a time, I was blazing through dozens of pages each night. I would hold the Kindle in one hand and sooth our child with the other.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, unwieldy title aside, is something of a modern business classic. It's often included in lists of books that "Every Startup Founder Should Read". CEO hopefuls keep it under their pillow in case some of the wisdom sticks. Ben Horowitz is even more well-known for his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in some of the most successful companies of the past decade such as Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Lyft. He built his own company, then he helped others build theirs. In a way, Ben Horowitz is the Jay-Z of Silicon Valley.

Horowitz gets a few things right. Per the title, he argues that companies spend too much time worrying about strategy, when most things in business don't lend themselves easily to stale academic study. Sometimes things go wrong and you need to choose between two catastrophic alternatives. Sometimes your company is caught off guard by a sudden market shift. Most management books use hindsight to make everything sound much simpler than it actually was. The hardest decisions are often made after two weeks of sleep deprivation and under extreme stress. Maybe your personal life is just as distressed. Maybe you need to fire your best friend. In the moment, the pressure is much higher than Harvard Business Review case studies let on.

Roughly half of the book describes the story of Opsware, the company founded by Horowitz with Marc Andreessen. The other half is a collection of advice for would-be managers. Some of the advice is genuinely useful: "Hire for strength rather than lack of weakness", for example. Sometimes it's actually pretty funny: "If I had a tattoo for every time I heard a CEO claim that she’d just hired 'the best VP in the industry,' I’d be Lil Wayne.". I appreciate the effort that has gone into keeping the message as simple as possible without dumbing down the content. Again, the bar for business books continues to be low, but you could clearly do worse.

Super Pumped by Mike Isaac

I recently reviewed John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, in which the founder and ex-CEO of Theranos was ousted as a compulsively lying sociopath. Theranos, a Silicon valley startup once worth billions, promptly collapsed as the public became aware of its true nature. Uber, the subject of Super Pumped, isn't as bad a company as Theranos, but it comes much closer than I anticipated.

Super Pumped and Bad Blood have, surprisingly, a lot in common. Both were written by prominent business journalists (from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal respectively) who uncovered scandals within the companies with the help of whistleblowers. Of the two, Carreyrou is perhaps the more successful exposé as his reporting directly led to the end of Theranos. Isaac's allegations against Uber are not as damning, but they touch on the same themes; venture capital's excesses, egotism, founder worship and the normalization of toxic working culture.

Uber is a staple of global business news, so I thought I knew what to expect. Super Pumped is the story of Uber and Travis Kalanick, its founder. Uber started out as a way for limousine drivers to earn extra income while waiting for scheduled gigs. High-flying "ballers" could hail a limousine with their smartphone at their convenience. Most of us know Uber as the low-cost taxi service, where anyone can be a driver, but that came only later. Ridesharing was pioneered by Uber's nemesis Lyft, but Uber quickly stole the concept and beat Lyft to the market. It was the first in a series of dirty moves that many people associate with the company.

Uber has been so controversial that Wikipedia helpfully provides readers with a 21 point list of criticisms against the company. Combine those with the immorality of its founders and management and it's hard to continue using the company's services. I remember using Uber for the first time and being amazed by both the app and the service. Catching a cab with an app was already enticing, but paying less for it than a standard taxi was the real hook. In hindsight, some of the warning signs were there from the beginning. Prices were low because venture capitalists picked up a significant portion of the tab. Since then, driver satisfaction has nosedived as Uber has reduced their fees.

Most surprisingly, despite being one of the fastest growing companies ever, Uber's management made a string of inexplicably bad business decisions. Kalanick saw himself as the first American that could crack the Chinese consumer market. China, however, already had its share of ridesharing apps that understood the market better than an arrogant American rival. Uber ended up burning billions of dollars in China, Russia and other markets it barely understood. Kalanick believed that Uber needed to be the first to enter a market to "win" it. But from the start it was obvious that ridesharing isn't a natural monopoly. Rivals like Bolt, Didi Chuxing and Lyft have shown that stamina matters more than blitz.

Super Pumped reads like a series of extended newspaper stories. It's standard practice and quite accessible, but it also guarantees that there is little to say beyond the crisp content. I barely got to the juicy details here, and I'm happy to recommend Super Pumped to others, perhaps just to spread the word on Uber. Bad Blood succeeded in taking down Theranos. Unfortunately, there has been no such luck with Super Pumped yet.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

There are a lot of great jokes in Slow Horses, its title included. Slough House is a halfway home of sorts for disgraced MI5 agents; the Slow Horses. Any number of reasons can earn you a transfer to Slough House. Botching an operation, alcoholism, political machination; all might put your career on hold and send you to the drab establishment on the edge of London. Working at Slough House is designed to be mind numbingly boring. The goal is that you slowly realize that quitting is the only way out.

Slow Horses may be written as a spy thriller, but comedy is where it truly shines. I rarely enjoy written humor, but Mick Herron combines excellent prose with classic British comedy in a unique way. Parts of it remind me of the excellent The Sellout from a few years ago, although the subject matter couldn't be more different. Herron succeeds in selling the funny with the serious and in creating characters who are both fantastical and relatable. Established voices like John le Carré rarely go beyond sly and clever in their work. This doesn't mean that le Carré leaves me cold, very much the opposite, it just underlines how well Herron pulls it off.

Jokes are, of course, not to be explained. River Cartwright is one of the ex-spies assigned to Slough House after a disastrous training exercise. His promising career is sidetracked and he finds himself running trivial errands for Jackson Lamb, the rotund traditionalist heading the department. The whole affair seems like a dead end. Nothing of interest has happened at Slough House in years and the other inhabitants (inmates?) seem disinterested or fully checked out. However, as a teenager is kidnapped in front of his home, the Slow Horses are pulled into the intrigue. Saying more would considerably spoil some of the fun.

Slow Horses is the first in a series (six volumes so far), but it barely shows. An extended sequence introduces the cast without feeling like a setup for a second book. Understanding the characters is a payoff in its own right. It's all very self contained, even as the characters are clearly moved into position for the next story. I've often recommended J.K. Rowling's Cormoran Strike Series of private eye novels for people looking for an entertaining but well written thriller. If Herron's follow up, Dead Lions, is as impressive, I might consider changing my recommendation.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

1984 is one of the most widely read books of all time and a staple of the high school English class. Surprisingly, I had never read it. I've always been a fan of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" though. It's the foundational essay of how to write in the 20th century and a handy guide for editing your own writing. I try to adhere to it as much as possible. "Never use a long word where a short one will do" and "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out" are a few of the key ideas. Orwell's advice for writers is as strong today as it ever was.

Politics and the English Language and 1984 have surprisingly much in common. "Politics" is, above all, about how vague language encourages vague thinking. Writing and thought are more closely connected than most people think and embracing jargon, cliches, abstractions and political dada slowly erode a population's ability to think clearly. Often, resorting to a common figure of speech is just a way to avoid understanding what is being said. Politicians are typically the worst offenders - then and now - but academics, CEOs and news media are just as susceptible to lazy wording. The essay is one for the ages, so I'll do something that I've never done before and link it here.

In a way, 1984 is the fictionalized version of that essay. One of its main messages is that language is more than the medium of communication. The way we use language has a fundamental impact on how we think. In 1984, "Ingsoc" - the English Socialist party - has created "Newspeak", an artificial language based on English that is to be used in all official communication. Newspeak is designed to obfuscate ideas. Once Newspeak becomes the de facto language, the theory goes, it will become impossible to think unorthodox thoughts of the party. Newspeak is Orwell's finest argument against totalitarianism. The language is brutalist and reductivist and perfectly reflects the goals of its (fictional) creators.

Hundreds of studies and dissertations have been written about 1984. That doesn't mean that it's an academic endeavour or devoid of casual interest. The narrative is surprisingly compelling and relatable. Winston Smith is a mid-level party member, who finds himself on a slippery slope leading to betraying his party. It's part Philip K Dick sci-fi dystopia and part cold war spy fiction. Trust me, it's fantastic. Don't spend the first quarter of your life having not read 1984.

Pirulainen by Tomas Gads

In its original Swedish, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Män som hatar kvinnor: Men who hate women. Tomas Gads - actually a duo of Finnish women - could perhaps borrow that title for their translation of "Pirulainen". A police thriller, very much in tune with Stieg Larsson, Pirulainen begins with the death of an industrialist in the Turku archipelago in western Finland. Police have a hard time telling if it's murder or an accident, but the victim's family and business life all point at problems just beneath a pristine surface. And, in the end, it's the women who have it worst.

Turku is a surprisingly good location for a crime thriller. It's a city, but small enough to have some small town vibes. It's not the small town from The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, but it's also not the metropolis of so many police thrillers. Turku's archipelago is a massively underused setting in Finnish literature. Each July, Finns hop on boats and travel the thousands of islands, staying in idyllic villages and enjoying the rugged beauty and untouched nature of the national park. But once the holiday season is over, and especially as the winter months set in, the islands are a hostile home to a few thousand inhabitants, who sustain themselves on fishing and boredom. Most winters, ice surrounds the islands and makes travel difficult or impossible. Only the eccentric seem to survive the whole year. Most of the action in Pirulainen takes place in the city of Turku, but the opening drama - and a memorable mid-book detour - make use of the archipelago.

Pirulainen stands out from many crime thrillers by focusing on the police charged with the investigation and not the killer. At the center is Halme squad, a relatively diverse group of detectives that share the spotlight. There is even an Enid Blyton moment as the cast is introduced one by one: their conflicts and quips are what drive the action, especially when the investigation hits a bump. Gads is surprisingly merciful to his cast: their weaknesses are not only humane but also hilarious. The IT guy is a desperate ladies' man. The single mother, previously a big-time business leader, is addicted to online video games. The latter has an affair with her daughter's football coach (goalie coach to be exact), who turns out to also be the coroner assigned to the case. It's funny and heartfelt, but doesn't take away from the book's overall mood.

My biggest gripe is stylistic. Gads plays it fast and loose with points-of-view and the effect is jarring at times. Most people won't mind, let alone notice, but when the story follows the police to an interview and the perspective suddenly shifts to the interviewee's point-of-view, it feels off. The focus is deservedly on the police, so a shift into someone else's thoughts sticks out. Also, chapters focusing on the police are interrupted by someone visiting a shrink and the musings of the killer. Combining so many voices in one book strains the reader's attention. It's a minor annoyance in an otherwise exciting book.

Gads is clearly laying the groundwork for a follow-up. In addition to the (relatively minor) twist ending, there is a lot left to unpack within the squad itself. Sergei, a Finn with a Russian name and a history of working the eastern border, is perhaps the prime candidate for a continuation. Novel characters are hard to come by, especially in police thrillers that tend to rely on familiarity for effect.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Where would we be without Michael Lewis? Few authors can claim their work to contribute as much to the global vocabulary on finance, sports and analytics. Moneyball, The Big Short, Flash Boys and, now, The Fifth Risk have become shorthand for step changes in their respective industries. You can't talk about the 2008 financial crisis without talking about The Big Short and any conversation about sports analytics is bound to mention Moneyball. In addition to these landmark books, Lewis has also written the best outsider's view of behavioral economics (The Undoing Project) and recorded one of the best non-fiction podcasts of 2019 (Against the Rules). I've reviewed Lewis several times on this blog already, but I can't help feeling a little giddy everytime I see a new release from him. He's just that good.

The Fifth Risk, a look into three misunderstood US federal agencies, is not teeming with fascinating characters like The Big Short and doesn't evoke the same warm feelings as The Undoing Project, but it does leave you with a genuine sense of bewilderment and disbelief. In a telltale anecdote, a US presidential candidate singles out The Department of Energy as one of the governmental agencies that he would close if elected. But what exactly does the DOE do? With a budget of over 20 billion dollars, it must be an example of government waste, goes the thinking. The DOE is, in fact, in charge of maintaining the country's nuclear material and weapons, a task that any presidential hopeful is likely to applaud. Throughout the book, Lewis shows how an orthodoxy of small government has blinded us to some of the obviously good and necessary work being done within it.

The Fifth Risk - explained as the risk that comes from neglecting unlikely long term risks like nuclear accidents - is split in three sections, each of which addresses a different governmental agency: the aforementioned DOE, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce. Unlike most of Lewis's books, the characters don't transcend their roles and are confined to individual sections. It's my only squabble. The Fifth Risk reads more like three excellent pieces of investigative journalism than a fully realized book. I first read parts of the DOE chapter in Vanity Fair (and loved it!), but The Fifth Risk takes the story only a bit further.

As with Lewis's work in general, there are multiple levels here. The Trump administration's disinterest in actually running the government is the obvious starting point. It's only the surface. In a concise 200 pages, Lewis addresses many of the ails of the modern United States. Politics is untethered from reality and policitcians are unable to perform some of government's most rudimentary functions. Blatant cronyism has suddenly become acceptable. "The free market" is expected to right wrongs that are clearly beyond its control. Somehow, freewheeling fools and disingenuous charlatans are given government positions that they barely understand. The whole polity is obsessed with regime affiliation, and so on.

It's a grim read with black humor that would make for a great Cohen brothers movie. The Fifth Risk is, among many other things, a reminder that details matter. It's easy to deal in imperatives and principles. It's much harder to gain a genuine understanding of an issue and work years to address it. It's a critique that is first directed at a number of political movements in the Western world - the Republicans, populist Europe, modern monetary theory - but it's not limited to them. Understanding and working with dirty details is perhaps the best vaccination against tribalism and government dysfunction.

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Leonardo da Vinci barely needs introductions. He is one of the poster children for genius alongside Einstein and Newton and his Mona Lisa is the best known work of art in the world. You would think that his story has been repeated ad infinitum in previous biographies. Isaacson, however, justifies this book's existence well. He is best known for his era-defining look into the life of Steve Jobs and, given his generalist background, he has the right background to deliver a balanced recounting of the polymath's story. After all, Leonardo's life is a combination of flamboyant brilliance, as seen in his best known paintings, grinding procrastination and an overall search for truth in a country on the cusp of a scientific revolution.

There are surprisingly few contemporary accounts of Leonardo and even those greatly embellish his life. Isaacson relies on Leonardo's notebooks for context, and with good reason, as those provide the best view into the mind of the artist. Leonardo was an obsessive note taker and his notebooks, the majority of which have survived for posterity, are filled with amazing sketches and thoughts written in his peculiar mirror-script. Paper was precious at the time, so he would revisit old drawings and continue a different topic on a used page. Or he would combine two drawings in unexpected ways: curly hair evolving into a water eddy or a tree evolving into a human circulatory system. Isaacson gracefully includes pictures of the relevant notebook pages, which is one reason to buy the book in hardcover and not Kindle format.

Isaacson proclaims that the notebooks are the primary inspiration for his interpretation of Leonardo. It's a good starting point, but it also underlines his weakness in interpreting Leonardo's art. At least for a layman, Isaacson's description of Leonardo's main oeuvre is too flowery and comes too close to some of the cliches that circulate about art criticism. He takes his interpretations one step too far and often repeats himself unnecessarily. His description of Leonardo's and Michelangelo's rivalry is much more interesting than the description of The Battle of Anghiari, a lost Leonardo that was commissioned to sit across the room with a Michelangelo. Leonardo's work and personality are best viewed in the context of another genius of the era, and it's a shame that Isaacson spends so little time on Leonardo's contemporaries. Leonardo is dandy and outgoing, but so fixated on perfecting ephemeral elements in his art that he often forfeits his commissions and leaves work unfinished. He would spend as much time perfecting a piece's perspective as he would on painting some of the figures. Michelangelo, on the other hand, slept in his clothes and, occasionally, in his boots. He would complete the largest and arguably most famous religious painting in the world: the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

I have a fundamental disagreement with Isaacson's description of Leonardo. He views the artist's inability to finish some of his main works - namely, The Battle of Anghiari and The Adoration of the Magi - as another display of his brilliance. According to his interpretation, the works were dropped because Leonardo could not find the perfect way to work out a particular detail in the painting; an artificial perspective or the right painting material. Leaving imperfect paintings unfinished means, in this oblique logic, that all finished paintings must be perfect, thus proving his genius. The same reasoning is applied to his inventions, like helicopters, crossbows and other apparatus, which were mostly untested in the field. For me, Leonardo was seminal in spite of this trait, not because of it. By being a fraction less demanding on himself, he would have produced even more great pieces of art without much reducing its quality. Art criticism often focuses on minutiae - which perhaps explains its love of Leonardo - but the world in general would have benefited if this particular genius had a slightly less perfectionist approach to life.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point may have been one of the first non-fiction books I read. I borrowed it from a friend in high school as he described it as a "modern classic", whatever that means in the context of modern non-fiction. In a way, I've been on that path ever since. I've never been a disciple of Malcolm Gladwell in the way that some people seem to be, but I do follow his writing and, more recently, his podcast Revisionist History. I recommended The Tipping Point to my wife - it's succinct, entertaining and touches on some of the cornerstones of sociology - but ended up reading it myself once it landed on my bedside table.

It hasn't aged well, but it still has surprisingly much to offer. The Tipping Point describes a theory about social epidemics that Gladwell has amalgamated from academic studies and his own thinking. A social epidemic is how fidget spinners, high (or low) waisted jeans and Instagram suddenly became central fixtures of western societies without any seemingly deliberate plan behind them. Gladwell lays out the three key components in compellingly simple terms: it's about the people, the context and the content. Certain types of people are vastly more powerful in spreading a social epidemic. Mavens learn every minute detail of a new product and act as data banks. Connectors spread the message by, well, being connected. Salesmen convince others to act on the information curated by mavens and distributed by connectors.

It may not be worth it to explore the contents of The Tipping Point in more detail. The theory itself has held up well over time, but the anecdotes and other trivia are hilariously out of date. The dramatic drop in crime in the United States was a recent phenomenon at the time of release, but today it is being studied as if it were ancient history (and the reasons behind the decline are perhaps better explored in Freakonomics). Hush Puppies and Airwalk have not been in the public mind since more or less since the release of this book. The Tipping Point was released in 2000 at the height of the dot-com bubble. Social networks wouldn't properly exist for another decade. Their existence would increase the speed of social epidemics by an order of magnitude: today, tweets travel faster than seismic waves (https://xkcd.com/723/).

Gladwell's framework for understanding social epidemics seems to do well in today's world of Facebook, Brexit and Trump. What it lacks, though, is a compelling exploration of a single phenomenon that would showcase the theory in action, starting from the first person who reacts to a coming social epidemic. The author doesn't show us who were the first people to adopt Hush Puppies. He only speculates about their existence. This increased focus on the people in social epidemics would be a great way to study contemporary phenomena. For example, why is Naziism resurging on the political right? Why do some environmental initiatives surge (reducing plastic or carbon compensation), while others never find traction (emissions trading or reduction of meat production subsidies)? The Tipping Point could benefit from a complete rewrite, not because it describes the world poorly, but because it was ten years ahead of its time.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

How to Stop Time is the absolute opposite of what I normally read. I picked it up at the airport - a gift for my wife - on the relative strength of its funny back cover. Most casual reading tries to hide behind a facade of sophistication. The plots are too complex, they try to pander to trends set up by better works or they might simply overplay their hand. I'm looking at you The Woman in the Window. How to Stop Time was the exact opposite of that. It put its silliness in plain sight - the last line on the cover is "as long as he doesn't fall in love" - and doesn't pretend to be more than the most casual reading at an airport newsstand. An About a Boy, Nick Hornby for the 2010s.

Here's the gimmick. Tom Hazard is essentially immortal. Having reached puberty, he barely ages. He was born in medieval France and has since lived in dozens of countries under hundreds of aliases. His mother was executed as a witch and, ever since, he's been on the run from suspicion and superstition. During the years, he's conveniently met Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He's been a grade school teacher, a pianist and a stage musician. The premise is just as exciting as a really good nap, and the plot never really shakes things up beyond what you might expect. Historical events and people are duly mentioned. Lost loves and family are central but never explored further than the generic: "will she be found?". There is a very mild surprise at the end related to mild villainy.

For the casual reading that it is, How to Stop Time is not entirely without merit. Haig conjures a sense of pain arising from living longer than one's time. As Hazard's life spans multiple generations, he sees the circularity of time and becomes complacent as mistakes are repeated and collective memory fades. Other "albas" - people with the same condition who, like albatrosses live beyond our expectations - show a credible variety of approaches to living forever. One passes time by surfing in southern Australia, another is consumed by anger. The most memorable one has built a society to protect others of his kind, but ends up managing it through charisma tinged with conspiracy. Living forever is a curse and not a blessing in How to Stop Time.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

In the past, stock bubbles have usually been popped by flagrant misdoings or scandals. Worldcom and Enron downed the dot-com bubble and Lehman Brothers and AIG kicked off the global financial crisis in 2008. The latter, of course, was more than an accounting scandal. It was a result of the realization that financial instruments and consumer debt had changed beyond the control of regulators and financial markets. Theranos, the choice corporate evil in Bad Blood, seems now like it should have triggered a similar reckoning in the venture capital and startup world.

For a while, Theranos was one of the most valuable private companies in the world and Elizabeth Holmes, it's founder and CEO, one of the youngest self-made billionaires. After a series of classic investigative pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Theranos quickly unravelled and suffered a massive public humiliation. Its value dropped to nothing, as did its founder's. John Carreyrou, the journalist behind the reveal, wrote Bad Blood as a bookend to the story, a final testament to the absurdity and con-artistry of the company and it's backers.

Theranos made its name by claiming to have solved a key problem in medicine: the use of venipuncture needles. It's technology could supposedly run hundreds of blood tests on a pinprick sample from the tip of a finger. The promise was substantial but the product was terrible. Theranos ran almost all of its tests on the conventional laboratory equipment it had bought from competitors and never settled on what it's business model or product actually was. Yet, with the support of the prominent individuals on its board, it was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of financing with a valuation of 9 billion dollars. The scale of the fraud is staggering and it still strikes me as nuts. How were Holmes and her paramour-COO Sunny able to project revenues that were so obviously non-existent? Why didn't investors do the basic due diligence of checking up on the "deals" the company claimed it had made?

Holmes herself is the key element in this mystery. Initial stories indicated her charisma as the reason she was able to pull it off. Carreyrou shows that this is only the first part. Her parents, rich and well connected, were able to support her claims by making connections and possibly pulling strings. To make things even more ridiculous, her father was a vice president at Enron when the company went bankrupt. That detail would be too on-the-nose if it was fiction, but alas it is not.

Bad Blood accidentally showcases the general decay of the American corporate system. A company built on the back of inherited wealth and power makes its way to the top of Silicon Valley by faking it without ever making it. Theranos' only successes - it's deal with Walgreens - can be attributed to a health care system that puts emphasis on revenue generation and not patient health. Its pitch - a disruption of laboratory testing - was nowhere near realistic. As the secrets were spilling, Theranos hired the most expensive lawyers to harass and discredit potential whistleblowers.

To get back to my initial thought, the question of a startup bubble seems more pressing today than it did when Theranos failed. Uber, Lyft, Impossible Foods and other venture capital companies have gone public with grossly inflated valuations that are nearly impossible to justify. Uber seems especially unlikely to be worth this much in a few years. It's businesses are unprofitable despite slowing growth (a Silicon Valley anathema) and the company has not been successful in building the kind of "moat" that it promised investors even a few years ago. Theranos should have been the scandal that killed these kinds of valuations, but it didn't, so we might need to wait a few more years for the end of this bubbly era.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

I forget why I decided to reread The Big Short on short notice. It could have been that I felt like reading something short and entertaining after struggling with a few other books, both of which I ended up not finishing. I guess it takes a very specific type of person to consider The Big Short "entertaining" though. It's a dissection of the financial instruments that created the financial crisis in 2008 and a character study of the people, who saw it coming. Dozens of paragraphs are dedicated to describing how mortgage bonds, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps work. It's absolutely obligatory to understand these products to understand the inner workings of a bonkers financial system. It does mean, however, that some readers will be bored out of their minds by the technical aspects of the banking system.

Apparently that was never me; I've been fascinated by the financial sector for years, despite never working in it and only having taken a few introductory courses on the subject. I was in high school in 2008 and I distinctly remember reading news about the banks and companies that were going bankrupt all over the world. There was a finality in the air as no one really knew what part of the financial infrastructure would fail next. Even though I had no money at the time and didn't own a credit card - and had little to lose - the drama felt more real than wars in the Middle East or famine in North Korea. I've always found it difficult to explain why some things are compelling and others are not. Some interests seem ingrained and a fascination for financial markets seems to be (just one of) my soft spots.

Michael Lewis is, of course, a titan of the non-fiction journalistic take. It seems completely absurd that three of his to-the-point and unembellished books have become Hollywood movies starring actors like Brad Pitt (twice!) and Sandra Bullock. Today, people use the word Moneyball - the name of another Lewis book and movie combo - to describe the use of analytics and statistics in the management of sports teams. For years, his contributions have had an outsize impact on the intellectual community. His recent podcast "Against the Rules" proves the versatility of his approach. Fascinating and often oddball characters catch readers (and listeners) off guard. Simply guiding readers through theory rarely elicits strong reactions from a general audience. Lewis can address almost any topic on earth, no matter how complicated or obtuse, because he approaches it from a human point of view.

Having read most of his other work, I still consider The Big Short to be the crown jewel. It's relatable not only because it's characters are relatable, but because Lewis has an intimate and personal understanding of the industry and its problems. His prologue is not unlike the prologue in Slaughterhouse Five: it puts the author in the midst of a cataclysm that he knows is coming but cannot stop. Even now, we know that the global financial system is far from fixed. Over one trillion dollars of bad student debt has been handed out to Americans. Uber and Lyft have sold shares to the public at grossly inflated prices. European banks have been more than happy to launder money for Russian oligarchs. Any or all of these pieces may fall once the next catastrophe brings fear back into the market. When that day comes, Lewis is sure to be on the frontlines to explain where we, once again, went wrong.

Paranoidi Optimisti by Risto Siilasmaa

Risto Siilasmaa is one of the few business people in Finland, who is also a public figure. His predecessor at Nokia, Jorma Ollila, is another. "The Paranoid Optimist" recounts how Siilasmaa saved Nokia from certain bankruptcy by selling off key business and changing the company down to its core. It also, somewhat inadvertently, pits the two icons against each other.

In the time span of a few years, Nokia went from being the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world to being a side note in trade magazines. When smartphones were new, it produced more than half of all units in the world. At its peak, the company employed tens of thousands of people in Finland alone and accounted for over one percent of national GDP. It was a national icon in the same way that IKEA is for Sweden. Finns could say that it was acceptable that foreigners didn't know Finland as long as they knew Nokia. The speed with which that changed gripped the entire country. After a few catastrophic years, Nokia sold its mobile phone division to Microsoft in a deal that, at the time, felt like the end of a hegemony.

Siilasmaa was at the center of the fight, first as a board member, then as the chairman and later as interim CEO. When he joined the company, Ollila embodied the soul of the company as its chairman and the person most credited with building it into a juggernaut during his time as CEO. Siilasmaa criticizes Ollila mercilessly and, at least in part, this seems to be justified. Ollila ruled the board rigidly and with little discussion or discovery to explore changes in the industry. Even if you control for the hindsightedness - it's easy to see the rise of Apple and the iPhone after the fact - Ollila did go against most management doctrines by limiting board members' exposure to what was actually happening in the company and the industry. His officious approach obstructed genuine discussion and prevented management from seeing serious problems until it was too late.

The Paranoid Optimist is in no way the definitive history of Nokia - a history, which spans over 150 years and products from rubber boots to toilet paper - but it is an excellent opinion piece on a critical part of that history. Siilasmaa stretches the reader's interest a bit by introducing the Alcatel-Lucent acquisition, which seems a little shoehorned in. For most of the book, however, he is able to hold the reader's interest. His management views follow Richard Rumelt more than Michael Porter, and provide nice anecdotes for director-level discussion. Hopefully his unassuming tone and clarity of thought are taken up in the business world. With The Paranoid Optimist, Siilasmaa shows that he is, not only, one of the foremost management thinkers in Finland, but also relatively grounded and sensible in his writing.

The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre

Keeping with the theme of cold war spy thrillers; The Spy and the Traitor. If you've read (or seen) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre, you'll know exactly what's going on. The difference is that this time it's all real (and personal). The Spy and the Traitor is a spy thriller that also happens to be the real deal. Oleg Gordievsky is a KGB agent stationed in Copenhagen, who starts to have misgivings about his masters. As he rises in the communist ranks, he establishes an elaborate double agent routine with MI6 in the United Kingdom that comes to form the backbone of western intelligence on the Soviet Union for almost a decade. In a cruel twist of fate, he is undone by an alcoholic CIA agent with an expensive wife, who sells his identity to the KGB. In a frantic covert operation behind the iron curtain, MI6 tries to smuggle Gordievsky across the Finno-Russian border to save him from a certain death.

It is sometimes difficult to identify this as non-fiction, based solely on the story and characters. Macintyre does an excellent job of building a presentable cast of support characters. He's the Michael Lewis of spy thrillers and in some ways, this is Flash Boys but with spies. He has the same ability to make the most mundane details seem worthy of prolonged consideration as Mr. Lewis, and in his hands, a story that could be told dully, is suddenly gripping. The author's own excitement with the details is what really sells the story. Will a KGB informant see Gordievsky standing on a Moscow street corner and identify the Safeway plastic bag, his signal to British intelligence, and comprehend that it's not something an observant communist would sport? Did a nappy, conveniently soiled by the baby on board, distract the dogs at the Finland-Russia border crossing?

Macintyre's inquisitiveness also left me pondering the value of the global intelligence game. Most of what Gordievsky exposed relates to the KGB and their armada of spies. So what is gained from this massive machinery? Spies watching spies is just another variant of a dog chasing its own tail. Gordievsky ousts his own as lazy: they invent contacts and operatives and name government officials as informants when they are anything but. They gather data from regional newspapers and pass it off as insider intelligence. As the KGB was partly faking it, why should I assume that MI6 was not? Granted Gordievsky did genuinely help foreign relations by helping Margaret Thatcher understand the Soviet leadership, but even then it is hard to see the benefits outweighing the costs.