The Spire the Novels." "A most remarkable book, as unforeseeable as one foresaw, an entire original... remote from the mainstream, potent, severe, even forbidding." – Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books, 30 April 1964. The Spire The Spire is a 1964 novel by the English author William Golding. "A dark and powerful portrait of one man's will", it deals with the construction of the 404-foot high spire loosely based on Salisbury Cathedral; the vision of the fictional Dean Jocelin. In this novel, William Golding utilises stream of consciousness writing with an omniscient but increasingly fallible narrator. Jocelin, the Dean of the
Chapman Pincher public setting in the near future. Wright, a retired MI5 Soviet counterespionage officer, was Pincher's main source for "Their Trade is Treachery", along with British MP Jonathan Aitken and Wright's former colleague Arthur S. Martin. Aitken, using information from retired CIA counterespionage chief James Jesus Angleton, wrote a highly confidential letter in early 1980 to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, outlining Angleton's suspicions of Hollis acting as a double agent. Pincher became ensnared in 1986 in the "Spycatcher" affair, when Wright tried to publish his own book in Australia, in apparent violation of his oath-taking of the Official Secrets Act