A ‘world of method and intrigue’: Muriel Spark's Literary Intelligence

In 1944, Muriel Spark was recruited by the Foreign Office to work as a Duty Secretary in the Political Warfare Executive at Milton Bryan. ‘I played a very small part,’ Spark wrote in her autobiography, ‘but as a fly on the wall I took in a whole world of method and intrigue in the dark field of Black Propaganda or Psychological Warfare, and the successful and purposeful deceit of the enemy.’ Drawing on research in Spark's personal and literary archives at the McFarlin Library, Tulsa, and the National Library of Scotland, this essay explores the ways in which this ‘world of method and intrigue’ is taken in and reformulated in Spark's writing. Political espionage takes centre-stage in several of Spark's fictions, and a preoccupation with secrecy and spying runs through her work. But the methods of black propaganda can also be read as a secret sharer of some of Spark's most characteristic aesthetic strategies. Focusing in particular on Spark's most direct treatment of her secret war work – The Hothouse by the East River – critical tension centres on reading Spark's literary intelligence less as a re-enactment than as a subversion of the logics of disinformation.

Book Review [Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate]

This is a book review of the book by Ben McKelvey (2020), Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate, Hachette Australia. Published by - Hachette Australia (Sydney, 2020) Format - Paperback ISBN - 978-0-7336-4541-9 339 pages Reviewed by John Battersby 'Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate' looks at parallel paths in the Al Qaeda (AQ) and ISIS inspired conflicts of the 2000s. On the one hand, it looks at those who were lured by AQ and ISIS propaganda into conceiving plots in Australia (a number were caught in the Pendennis operation), while another killed a civilian employee in October 2015 and several others left Australia to fight in Iraq and Syria in the period of ISIS’s ascendency. At the same time McKelvey relates the coinciding story lines of a number of Australian special forces personnel who were deployed to Afghanistan in 2001 and after 2003 (including the mid-2010s) to Iraq. Their exploits are detailed, the rationale for their deployment and operations is given, and light is shone on the consequences for those individuals personally. It is too often the fate of those who give their loyalty and commitment to their country, to discover that their country seldom reciprocates in equal measure. The inconsequential occasional mis-demeanours by highly disciplined servicemen that offend the sensibilities of their higher commanders were punished harshly, and the enormous personal and psychological toll that inevitably falls on individuals deployed to war-zones has not been adequately addressed by Australia. Service personnel surviving war zones to commit suicide when they come home is not an acceptable outcome of these deployments.

A Secret War in the Mediterranean

This chapter recounts thirty coordinated attacks and bombings that took place in Algiers on 1 November 1954, in which seven people were killed and five of them were white colonists (pied-noir). It analyzes the statement of French Prime Minister Mendes that there should be no compromise when it came to the integrity of the sovereign territory of the republic after France had suffered a terrible defeat in Indochina. It also mentions the peasant army of the brilliant Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap that captured 11,000 French troops after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. The chapter talks about thirty-eight-year-old Ahmed Ben Bella, who stood out among the top leaders of FLN, a socialist party founded in Switzerland. It investigates the French counterintelligence and executive illegal groups that was used to solve the Algerian question with counterterror all over Europe.

Book Review: Heidi Blake, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West. New York: Mulholland Books, 2019.

In the years following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western leaders and political scientists lauded the turning point in history as a momentous triumph of democracy and economic liberalism over communism and the doomed command economic model. Western nations and the United Kingdom in particular, saw the period immediately after the Soviet collapse as an opportunity for political and economic cooperation not seen in more than a half century. Lavish public relations events including state dinners, meetings with the Queen of England and inclusion on the G-8 Economic Council were all extended to and accepted by Russia’s president in the years following what many in the West considered a victory for global democracies everywhere. Yet in Heidi Blake’s book, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West, what becomes vividly clear is that to Putin, this event marked the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” (p.12), and he laid the blame squarely on the West.

Sangre de amor correspondido: a small secret war

Por su rareza, Sangre de amor correspondido se distingue de las otras siete novelas que publicó Manuel Puig. No sólo porque fue compuesta a partir de la grabación, transcripción y traducción de entrevistas que mantuvo en portugués con un albañil brasilero, sino, y en particular, por los interrogantes que plantea con respecto a la autoría, la economía política del sexo, la sexualidad y la lengua. Esta condensación de elementos le otorga una singularidad que puede funcionar como punto de referencia para estudiar otros textos de la época, la de 1980, mientras aún perduraba en América Latina la creencia en el poder emancipador que le asignaba a la literatura su supuesta autonomía.