Adrian Turpin

Dodgy Dossier

An Officer and a Spy

By

Hutchinson 496pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

‘It is a déformation professionnelle: all spymasters go mad in the end,’ observes the hero of Robert Harris’s An Officer and a Spy, in what is clearly a warning from history. No dossier was ever as dodgy as that used in 1894 to convict Captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason; a barefaced collection of dud forensics and outright forgeries, it was never presented in open court for reasons of ‘national security’.

Dreyfus’s supposed deception was to pass military secrets, not even particularly important ones, to the Germans. His true crime was to be a wealthy Jew with financial interests in Germany during a period when paranoia about France’s old foe was at its peak and a xenophobic press operated unchecked.

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

    • RT : Founded in 1979, is a trusted independent source for reviews of new books across a variety of genres. A… ,
    • RT : Here we are - "Shelf Indulgence" by Ed Potten, a wonderful read, well worth your time: @Lit_Review,
    • 'Like going to a party hoping to get away as quickly as politeness allowed and at 4am finding myself still engrosse… ,
    • 'Neville never shed his sense of being the junior, and perhaps least-deserving Chamberlain.' From the archive, Mic… ,
    • 'The erecting and immediate destruction of a series of straw men rather detracts from what is for the most part an… ,
    • RT : A magnificent demolition job on this "acid laced tirade...unpleasantly self-obsessed...self pitying polemic...book… ,
    • 'Seventy years on, the time we have left to gather such first-hand testimony is running out.' John Keay on the sig… ,
    Follow Us