Authors Like Ben Macintyre

Ewen Montagu

British · The Man Who Never Was (1953), Beyond Top Secret U (1977)

Montagu was born in London in 1901 and served in naval intelligence during the Second World War, where he was one of the planners of Operation Mincemeat. The Man Who Never Was was his authorised account of it, published in 1953 and filmed in 1956. He died in 1985.

John le Carré

British · The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)

Le Carré was the pen name of David Cornwell, born in Dorset in 1931, who worked for MI5 and MI6 before writing full time. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is about the hunt for a Soviet mole inside British intelligence, a plot shaped by the Philby case. He wrote the afterword to Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends and died in 2020.

Graham Greene

British · Our Man in Havana (1958), The Human Factor (1978)

Greene was born in Hertfordshire in 1904 and worked for MI6 during the Second World War in a section run by Kim Philby. Our Man in Havana is a comedy about a vacuum-cleaner salesman who invents agents and reports for British intelligence; The Human Factor is a quiet novel about a double agent. He wrote the introduction to Philby's memoir My Silent War and died in 1991.

Every book by Graham Greene →

Phillip Knightley

Australian · The First Casualty (1975), The Second Oldest Profession (1986)

Knightley was born in Sydney in 1929 and spent much of his career at The Sunday Times, where he co-wrote a 1968 book on Kim Philby and worked on the thalidomide investigation. The Second Oldest Profession is a history of twentieth-century espionage that questions how much intelligence agencies actually achieved. He died in 2016.

Erik Larson

American · The Devil in the White City (2003), The Splendid and the Vile (2020)

Larson was born in Brooklyn in 1954 and worked as a newspaper journalist before turning to narrative history. The Devil in the White City sets the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 against a serial killer working nearby; The Splendid and the Vile follows Churchill and his circle during the Blitz.

Every book by Erik Larson →

Sonia Purnell

British · Clementine (2015), A Woman of No Importance (2019)

Purnell is a journalist who has written biographies of Clementine Churchill and Boris Johnson. A Woman of No Importance tells the life of Virginia Hall, the American agent with a prosthetic leg who worked in occupied France for Britain's Special Operations Executive and later for the American OSS.

Lynne Olson

American · Citizens of London (2010), Madame Fourcade's Secret War (2019)

Olson is a former journalist who writes about Britain, the United States and occupied Europe in the Second World War. Madame Fourcade's Secret War follows Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who led one of the largest intelligence networks in occupied France, called Alliance.

Antony Beevor

British · Stalingrad (1998), D-Day (2009)

Beevor was born in 1946, served in the British Army and became one of the best-selling military historians in English. Stalingrad uses Soviet and German archives and letters to tell the battle through the people who fought it. In 2018 a Ukrainian state committee banned the Russian-language edition of Stalingrad over a passage on a wartime massacre; Beevor rejected the decision.

Kate Atkinson

British · Life After Life (2013), Transcription (2018)

Atkinson was born in York in 1951; her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995. Transcription follows Juliet Armstrong, a young woman recruited by MI5 in 1940 to type up secretly recorded conversations of British Nazi sympathisers.

Every book by Kate Atkinson →

Laurent Binet

French · HHhH (2010)

Binet was born in Paris in 1972. HHhH tells the story of the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague by two parachutists sent from London, and won the Prix Goncourt du premier roman. Its narrator keeps stopping to worry about what he is inventing and what he can actually know.