Many claims have been made for Sidney Reilly, described by one of his opponents, a former German naval officer, as ‘an ace of espionage’. It was said that Reilly ‘wielded more power, authority and influence than any other spy’, that he was an expert at ‘poisoning, stabbing, shooting and throttling’ and that he was a master of disguise who had eleven passports. Following Reilly’s death in 1925, newspapers dubbed him ‘the greatest spy in history’. Among his many admirers was Ian Fleming, creator of the most famous of fictional spies. ‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up,’ Fleming remarked. ‘He’s not a Sidney Reilly, you know.’

Like Bond, Reilly seems to have been irresistible to women. Pepita Bobadilla, who became his third wife in 1923, described how she ‘felt a delicious thrill run through me’ when their eyes met at their first encounter. She found him ‘well-groomed and well-tailored … with a lean, rather sombre face, which conveyed an impression of unusual strength of resolution and character’. His expression was that of a man ‘who not once but many times had laughed in the face of death’. Before they met, Reilly had already ‘assumed heroic proportions in my imagination’. She had heard him spoken of as ‘the most mysterious man in Europe’. (Bobadilla’s memoirs should be read with caution. A former dancer and chorus girl, she claimed at various times to have been a native of Ecuador, Argentina and Chile. In fact she had been born in Hamburg, the illegitimate daughter of an English maidservant and a German businessman. Her real name was Nelly Burton.)

Reilly was not the spy’s real name either. At different times in his life, he claimed to be the son of a merchant seaman, an Irish cleric and an aristocratic landowner connected to the court of the Russian tsar. The details of his origins remain obscure, but he