Spy Story (novel) Spy Story (novel) Spy Story is a 1974 spy novel by Len Deighton, which features minor characters from his earlier novels "The IPCRESS File", "Funeral in Berlin", "Horse Under Water", and "Billion Dollar Brain". In common with several of his other early novels, the chapter headings have a "feature". In "Spy Story" these take the form of excerpts from the fictional Studies Centre's rules. As in the earlier "Unnamed hero" novels, we never learn the protagonist's real name, only that he is living under the name Pat Armstrong. Armstrong works for the Studies Centre in London, where various tactical wargame
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.