Joseph Hone: 9 books

'In the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to Dublin.' Thus begins this extraordinary memoir by travel writer and novelist Joseph Hone, one of eight children farmed out by impecunious and inebriate parents, who...

Joseph Hone's The Paris Trap, first published in 1977, saw him step aside from his sequence of 'Peter Marlow' novels to offer a different kind of political thriller.Jim Hackett and Harry Tyson first met in Paris, in days of hope - Hackett a promising actor, Tyson a budding writer. Twenty years...

'Joseph Hone went to Zaire for the BBC. His aim was a series of talks about crossing Africa from coast to coast, as Stanley had done. That intention began, and ended, in Kinshasha... Having fallen in love in boyhood with the idea of Africa, he had looked for 'great liberating spaces', and found himself...

Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously...

To find an old friend, a past-his-prime spy steps into a war zone When Henry Edwards recruited him to work as an intelligence officer, Peter Marlow was young enough that espionage seemed romantic. They were in Cairo during the Suez Crisis, two young spies haunting dinner parties and back alleys...

Peter Marlow goes undercover to infiltrate the KGB The Soviet intelligence agency’s worst nightmare has come true: Besides the five directorates that oversee its operations, there lurks a sixth—a shadow directorate that may be plotting a coup against the Communist Party. Disruption of the...

Bored and broke, Marlow quits retirement to search for a mole within MI6 It’s springtime in Scotland, and an aging spy is tending to his bees. Smoke rises from his bellows as he looks in on the colony for the first time since winter. When his wife goes to check on him, the bellows are still...

Driven from his home, a former spy disappears into the wilderness After decades in the British Intelligence, Peter Marlow no longer has the heart for conflict. He retires to the countryside with his second wife, Laura, and her daughter, Clare, an eleven-year-old autistic girl who reminds Peter...

A discovery in his mother’s attic leads a painter into the dark world of underground art dealings Since childhood, Ben Contini has been enchanted by nudes. The first painting ever to move him was a Modigliani, a portrait of a naked and beautiful reclining woman. Though it scandalized his...