If you have read Macintyre before, you’ll recognise a classic example of his style: the journalist’s eye for salacious detail combined with a historian’s rigor. The rest of Redwood lives up to the attention-grabbing opening scene; I devoured it in a single sitting ... They are sometimes derided as “dadlit”, the kind of nonfiction read by golf club bores and armchair colonels. But Redwood is as far above yet-another-book-about-the-second-world-war as a George Smiley novel is above Jack Reacher ... So, by all means give Redwood to your father for Christmas, but make sure you read it yourself first: it’s superb.
The British writer Ben Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers ... He has done it again ... The book’s last pages are its saddest.
Mesmerising ... It is his insightful portrayal of the shifting relationship between the two spies — part mutual exploitation, part something akin to friendship — that powers Redwood and holds the attention through the complexities of its political context ... Chiefly its author’s triumph. Topical in its subject matter, deft in its depiction of the Polaroid colours of Tehran of the time, it is also a masterclass in the ethics of espionage. Above all, it brings to life the strains and responsibilities, the emotions and passions and inspirations — the eternally human concerns — of the spy’s world.
This story of a KGB double-agent in cold war Iran also shows that the most compelling tales, ridiculous characters and vertiginous stakes of spying are entirely, often unbelievably, real ... Redwood lives up to its claims, charting how one agent’s decisions prevented the US from deploying its nuclear arsenal, altering the power dynamics of the Middle East in a way that is strikingly relevant to current events ... The book’s strength is its sources ... Global crises are thrillingly interspersed with titbits of everyday espionage.
