Dear Reader,

The first woman chief of British Intelligence (MI5) died earlier this month. Dame Stella Rimington, who passed away at 90 years on August 3 was the inspiration for the ‘M’ played by Judi Dench in the recent Bond films.

I was first introduced to this first lady of British Intelligence by Parul Bavishi, co-founder of London Writers Salon.

“You enjoy spy novels, don’t you ? You should read Stella Rimington - her novels are so real, she knows it all - she used to be the Director-General of MI5”.

Parul’s recommendation led me to Rimington’s fiction and to her memoir, works that together illuminate the world of intelligence from an insider’s perspective.

Rimington’s novel The Hidden Hand tackles a chilling question: How do you transform a brilliant academic researcher into a spy for the Chinese state ? Set across Harvard and Oxford, the book has a real world feel, with a racy story that probably owes much to the author having spent decades in counterintelligence. In another series Rimington features Liz Carlyle, MI5 operative, who takes on terrorists, Russian assassins and other troublemakers.

From spy novels I move to Open Secret, Stella Rimington’s memoir. It’s interesting how so........

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