Billion-Dollar Brain was filmed as Billion Dollar Brain in 1967, the third installment of the Harry Palmer series of films based on Deighton's novels, featuring Michael Caine; it was a commercial flop. Billion-Dollar Brain Billion-Dollar Brain is a 1966 Cold War spy novel by Len Deighton. It was the fourth to feature an unnamed secret agent working for the British WOOC(P) intelligence agency. It follows "The IPCRESS File" (1962), "Horse Under Water" (1963), and "Funeral in Berlin" (1964). As in most of the author's novels, the plot of "Billion-Dollar Brain" (1967) is intricate, with many dead ends. The unnamed protagonist is ordered
The Painted Veil (novel) The Painted Veil (novel) The Painted Veil is a 1925 novel by British author W. Somerset Maugham. The title is taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet, which begins "Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life". The novel was first published in serialised form in five issues of "Cosmopolitan" (November 1924 – March 1925). Beginning in May 1925, it was serialised in the United Kingdom in eight parts in "Nash's Magazine". The biographer Richard Cordell notes that the book was influenced by Maugham's study of science and his work as a houseman at St Thomas' Hospital.