Andrew Lycett

Day of the Journalist

The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

By

Bantam Press 368pp £20 order from our bookshop

The publicity team at Frederick Forsyth’s publisher has done a good job of drumming up interest in his new memoir by focusing on the question of whether he was ever a member of the Secret Intelligence Service. The evidence suggests that, like many journalists working abroad, he enjoyed close relations with the ‘Firm’, as he rather ostentatiously likes to call it, but was never a fully fledged spook.

He is the kind of writer (and man) who looks up the local SIS chief when visiting a place to research a book. Why not? Men like ‘Johnny’ in Hong Kong have a finger on the local pulse. He showed Forsyth round the island and rather shocked him with his revelations about the Brits’ cooperation with the mainland Chinese

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • He weeps by the side of the ocean, He weeps on the top of the hill; He purchases pancakes and lotion, And chocolate… ,
    • 'Half-way through The Conquest of Water I felt as if I had been subjected to the literary equivalent of excessive c… ,
    • 'Volume five, then, but still no end in sight. Sandbrook is clearly enjoying himself so much he can’t bear the seri… ,
    • 'By the end of the book something so weighty, stylish and impressive has been built up that one feels far nearer to… ,
    • 'Her ensuing psychotic episode is described so convincingly ... that the reader will wonder if Dobrakovová did not… ,
    • 'The perspectives complement and contest one another, amounting to a glorious, atmospheric set of ventriloquisms.'… ,
    • RT : I reviewed The Testaments for . I will not be taking any questions at this time. ,
    Follow Us