From the bestselling author comes a beguiling comic memoir about a young woman who discovers her father is a spy (and was the model for John le Carré’s George Smiley) and goes to work as a secretary in 1950s MI5.
Charlotte Bingham is an internationally bestselling author whose
works include over thirty novels and two memoirs, Coronet Among the
Weeds and Coronet Among the Grass, which were adapted for
television. Often working with her husband, the writer Terence
Brady, she has also written extensively for stage and screen, most
notably helping to create Upstairs Downstairs and adapting Jilly
Cooper’s Riders for television. She lives in Somerset.
charlottebingham.com
An astonishing tale … She still has all the exuberant delight of a
teenager in telling stories to make herself and other people laugh.
Long may she write
*Sunday Times*
Imagine a Jilly Cooper heroine in an early John le Carré world … It
offers to our over-anxious age of Putin-dread, Corbynism and
cybercrime an enthrallingly nostalgic portrait of a post-war
Britain, an idyll where even the security services breathe a kind
of sweet innocence
*Times Literary Supplement*
A hilarious and candid account of her time at MI5: the shady
characters her father invites home, and anecdotes of office life
both absurd yet believable. Filled with period detail, Bingham’s
memoir is entertaining and extraordinary
*Observer*
Much fun, brilliant, sly … The more cynical of us might expect
treachery, backstabbing and boardroom power-grabs, but what Lottie
finds is "good folk and true, working away in the defence of our
lovely country, full of integrity, and so much fun". Given the
charming, flighty narrative that results, it would be a
hard-hearted reader who’d find fault with that
*Spectator*
A stone-cold comic classic … Joyfully silly, with undercurrents of
real danger
*Tatler*
Sparky and larky … Amusing
*Guardian*
I had underestimated Charlotte Bingham’s capacity to write
light-heartedly-and indeed, hilariously … In her book, one funny
story follows another … You will be sure to find this book a most
entertaining and enjoyable read
*Country Life*
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