Robert Harris

Harris was born in 1957 in Nottingham. His father was a printer and while he says "we had very little money, but I had no sense whatsoever of being poor and had an extremely happy and culturally rich childhood. My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter. The classic family story is us going to a school event when I was about six and all the other children reading out stories about what they did on their holidays, but mine was called 'Why me and my dad don't like Sir Alec Douglas-Home'.

There's a lot of moaning today about too many kids going to university, but my parents were bright people and I wish they had had that opportunity." Harris made his name as a novelist with Fatherland, his vaguely Orwellian, 1992 debut that posited a counter-factual history of Europe after Hitler had won the war. He followed it with bestsellers set among the second world war code-breakers of Bletchley Park (Enigma) and in the aftermath of Stalin's Russia (Archangel). He has transported contemporary political issues back to ancient Rome and, drawing on his close association with New Labour when a political journalist on the Observer and the Sunday Times, conjured a character very like the post-Iraq Tony Blair in The Ghost (2007).

The books have received warm reviews with a quote from Martha Gellhorn adorning the Fatherland jacket:"Powerful and chilling ... convincing in every detail". They have notched up even more impressive sales. Harris and his wife Gill, sister of Nick Hornby, and their four children live in a large old vicarage in Berkshire that was once visited by Jane Austen. It is usually described as "the house that Hitler built".
　　
In thinking about his latest book Harris's new wealth and his old politics came together. "When Lehman Bros went down people were saying AIG was going to be next. That rang a bell because almost all of my money was in some sort of AIG bond, but like most people I didn't understand the first thing about this world. When I looked into it a bit more it was terrifying and shocking. We're all like mountaineers on some rock face lashed together. We're clinging on for dear life. And at the same time there has been this alarming rise in the super-rich class, which has been somehow facilitated by new technology."
　　
Harris says he had little interest in writing about the new rich. "I have met some of them and they seem to me to be both boring and often themselves bored. But I was intrigued by these enormous amounts of money, all floating free of tax, which is profoundly undemocratic. We've all been like saps buying our pension funds and tracker whatevers, and while we've been left for dead, these people have cleaned up. Anger was not the least of my emotions in writing this book."
　　　　
Harris read English at Cambridge but spent most of his time editing the university newspaper. In 1978 he joined the BBC trainee programme "largely because at that time NUJ rules meant if you went into print journalism you had to start work in the provinces. I'd just come from the provinces and didn't particularly want to go back." While working on Newsnight and Panorama he co-authored a book with his friend Jeremy Paxman about the history of germ and gas warfare; he then wrote books about the media's handling of the Falklands war and an account of the forged Hitler diaries fiasco. By 1987 he was political editor of the Observer.

The master spy novelists

1. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Verloc is the first double-agent of the 20th century (he's working for an unnamed "foreign power", as well as being an informer reporting to Scotland Yard). Conrad's tragic protagonist is quintessentially seedy (his cover is a shop in Soho), the first in a long line of morally threadbare anti-heroes. Equally modern, in imagination and sensibility, is the terrorist "Professor", wired to his own bomb, and Verloc's wife Winnie's simple-minded brother, Stevie, who gets blown to pieces by the device. Verloc's lack of remorse for his complicity in Stevie's death finds echoes in the works of Graham Greene, confirming The Secret Agent's place in the pantheon of spy fiction.

3. The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

This is often described as the first 20th-century spy novel, but it's really the best of a pre-first world war genre of "invasion thriller" whose masters include William Le Queux and E Phillips Oppenheim, both now deservedly forgotten. An unputdownable tale of two British amateur sailors, one named Carruthers, who foil a German invasion plot in the slate-grey waters of the Baltic, The Riddle of the Sands is a classic British adventure story, influencing both John Buchan and Ken Follett. In a twist stranger than fiction, its author, a one-time clerk to the House of Commons, later became an ardent Irish Republican, and was eventually court-martialed, then executed, in 1922 for his part in the Easter uprising.

4. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

Richard Hannay was one of the great inter-war spies, a recently returned South African who gets caught up in a plot by the infamous Black Stone to assassinate the Greek premier Karolides and thereby precipitate a European war. Buchan wrote this "shocker" while convalescing from a duodenal ulcer in a matter of weeks. In keeping with a popular genre, he has the United Kingdom in danger of invasion by Germany while never letting the headlong momentum of the plot flag from one page to the next, sustained by headlong cross-country chases across well-known English and Scottish landscapes. Clean-cut, square-jawed Hannay would become the protagonist of several later Buchan thrillers, including The Island of Sheep, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast.

5. Ashenden by W Somerset Maugham

When war broke out in 1914, Maugham was sent by the British secret service to Switzerland on the pretext of completing a new play. As a celebrated writer with a gift for languages, Maugham had the perfect cover, and his assignment combined the romance as well as the absurdity of much British intelligence work. Maugham revelled in his posting. He created Ashenden as an alter ego, and used many of his own experiences in a collection of spy stories that demonstrate the ruthlessness, tedium and brutality of espionage. The essential drabness of the Ashenden stories was later influential in the spy writing of Len Deighton and John le Carré.

6. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Graham Greene worked just briefly for the British Secret Service during the second world war, but it was enough. One province of "Greeneland" would always be populated by various kinds of secret agent, culminating in the sad figure of Maurice Castle in The Human Factor. Perhaps more memorable is Greene's portrait of the accidental spy, Wormold, in his black comedy Our Man In Havana. Set in the last days of the corrupt Batista regime, Greene complained that the adventures of his vacuum cleaner salesman "did me little good" with Castro. "Those who suffered during the years of dictatorship," Greene wrote, "could hardly be expected to appreciate that my real subject was the absurdity of the British agent."

7. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Thanks to Hollywood, James Bond, 007, Licensed to Kill, has become the archetype of the 20th-century British spy, though, from an operational point of view, he is in all the ways that matter as exotic and improbable as Beau Brummell. Fleming had served in Naval Intelligence during the second world war, and translated many of his most madcap ruses de guerre to the pages of Casino Royale and its successors, every one of which was written in the tropical paradise of "Goldeneye", Fleming's Jamaican villa. It would be easy to attribute Bond's appeal to a successful formula of spooks, sadomasochism, and snobbery, mixed with sultry locations, but Fleming was a popular writer of genius. His prose is often as overheated as his plots, but it remains fresh, intoxicating and fun - a perfect fictional cocktail for jaded palates.