To connoisseurs of the early British spy fiction published during the decade or so before the First World War, purity constitutes part of the nostalgic appeal. Look back to the dashed-off novels of Headon Hill or E Phillips Oppenheim – or even to Erskine Childers’s more thoughtful The Riddle of the Sands – and you gaze on a simpler version of the Great Game, unclouded by the murky ambiguity that would later descend upon the hunched shoulders of the Ambler or Le Carré spook. 

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