It’s getting on for twenty-four years ago that I first read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1955). Books tend to come to us when we need them, and it’s easy to see why Tom Ripley’s project of self-reinvention and triumphant class resentment was so appealing to me as a twenty-year-old undergraduate. 

But something else happened at that time that I’ve never really got my head around. In the same week that I read the book, a letter appeared in my college pigeonhole from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office asking if I would be interested in a fast-track career in the British government. I’d heard of this happening and I knew its meaning. I was being tapped up by MI6.

It seemed like a Ripleyish prospect. Being undercover, maintaining a new identity, having to keep secrets from everyone. I imagined feeling as Ripley feels when the pressure starts to weigh on him – lonely, but in a self-dramatising way, cheering himself up by telling himself how glamorous it all is.

Why