Ashenden: The British Agent

This classic by English novelist, playwright, and short-story writer W. Somerset Maugham is based on the author's experience working for British intelligence during the First World War. The chapters of this novel are loosely linked vignettes set during that same period in diverse but always cosmopolitan milieux. The eponymous protagonist is involved in counter-intelligence operations in neutral countries on the Continent and travels to Russia, as Maugham himself did, to work to keep her in the war by preventing consolidation of early Bolshevik successes in the Revolution. Maugham, one of the most commercially successful authors of his time, provides the tautness, acerbic social commentary, and vivid, kaleidoscopic scenery and characters that make this a work of continuing interest even though a century has passed since the end of the Great War helped put the United Kingdom on the trajectory of imperial demise.