Neutral Ground

Neutral Ground: A Political History of Espionage Fiction takes the reader behind the fiction and explores the real-world political, military, and diplomatic events that have consistently and significantly threaded their way through the fabric of the genre. Against this historical timeline, it examines how numerous authors including Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and John le Carre have engaged reality in order to write the espionage novels that have become literary classics and, in selected cases, have also served to alter the course of government policy. --From publisher's description.