Spy story

Henry Hemmings sheds light on MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight

Intelligence officers and those who share London flats with pet bears named Bessie are alike off-piste human beings. If a man who is both also declines to consummate any of his three marriages, writes atrocious thrillers and attends seances with the satanist Aleister Crowley, he may reasonably be characterised as unusual.

Maxwell Knight, as Henry Hemming recounts in this excellent biography, spent 30 years in the service of MI5, and became an agent-runner celebrated throughout the tiny British secret world. Then, for the last seven years of his life, he became one of the first generation of television celebrities, contributing to a host of wildlife programs tales of relationships with snakes, marmosets, mongooses, cuckoos — and Bessie.