Beyond the spooks: The problem of the narrator in literary history

The discrepancies between a biography about a decorated Soviet intelligence agent and the authenticated facts of her life illustrate the inherent difficulties and ethical dilemmas of researching intelligence history. Kitty Harris was among the few women named in the official history of Soviet Intelligence because of her role as double-agent Donald MacLean’s controller and in running couriers from Mexico to Los Alamos in the late 1940s. Harris’s biography written by the former KGB agent Igor Damaskin, presents an example of a source that is unreliable since the majority of sources on which it is based remain closed to public scrutiny. This paper explores the difficulties of constructing a scholarly literary history in the field of intelligence when both interview sources and official records prove more unreliable, and susceptible to bias, than other public domain sources and records

The ethical turn in considering hidden children's Holocaust testimony as historical reconstruction

How to balance respect for the testimonial quality of post-Holocaust memoirs while critically analysing their value as historical witness statements? This question is explored through the author’s experience of collaborating on a memoir project with a Jewish subject who, as a child, was hidden in a Catholic convent in Belgium during the Second World War. Using the concepts of ‘collective memory, memory makers and memory consumers’, the author argues that witness statements are most valuable when read and understood within broader issues of political and historical structures. Using the example of Hidden Children’s testimony, the author examines how a range of historical actors can be acknowledged and appropriately recognised by comparing memories and by including appropriate contextual detail. The paper points to future research questions into how post-Holocaust memoirs are received and understood as historical artifacts by memory consumers

Poisoned Honey: The Myth of Women in Espionage

Our century’s fascination with the spy has produced at least as much mythology as recorded fact, and the romanticized picture of international espionage is never complete withoutthe alluring and dangerous femme fatale. But this misconception about the role of women in intelligence is not confined to spy novels and James Bond films; in many cases it has been nurtured at the very highest levels ofthe intelligence community

The Language of Espionage: Mata Hari and the Creation of the Spy-Courtesan

‘The Language of Espionage: Mata Hari and the creation of the spy courtesan’ by Julie Wheelwright offers an analysis of post-war narratives about Margaretha Zelle Macleod, the convicted espionage agent, which revived ancient fears of women using their erotic powers to extract information from men. The focus on this theme – often present in films, plays, biographies and even graphic novels – exposes concerns about women’s changing status in a time of traumatic upheaval. The enduring interest in Mata Hari, and therefore the linguistic meaning attached to her story, formed in the crucible of the Great War, offers insight into much larger themes about the individual’s relationship to the state, to their national, racial and sexual identity

The other place

This short memoir explores how growing up between cultures can produce a dual perspective on one’s individual history, concepts of home and belonging. The author meditates on how her English parents’ distancing of their past from ‘the other place’ made their children curious about the ‘home’ country and their relationship to it through the development of narratives. The essay also touches upon the perception of British immigrants to Canada as white settlers in the mid-twentieth century

HD 85567: A Herbig B[e] star or an interacting B[e] binary

Context. HD 85567 is an enigmatic object exhibiting the B[e] phenomenon, i.e. an infrared excess and forbidden emission lines in the optical. The object's evolutionary status is uncertain and there are conflicting claims that it is either a young stellar object or an evolved, interacting binary. Aims. To elucidate the reason for the B[e] behaviour of HD 85567, we have observed it with the VLTI and AMBER. Methods. Our observations were conducted in the K-band with moderate spectral resolution (R~1500, i.e. 200 km/s). The spectrum of HD 85567 exhibits Br gamma and CO overtone bandhead emission. The interferometric data obtained consist of spectrally dispersed visibilities, closure phases and differential phases across these spectral features and the K-band continuum. Results. The closure phase observations do not reveal evidence of asymmetry. The apparent size of HD 85567 in the K-band was determined by fitting the visibilities with a ring model. The best fitting radius, 0.8 +/- 0.3 AU, is relatively small making HD 85567 undersized in comparison to the size-luminosity relationship based on YSOs of low and intermediate luminosity. This has previously been found to be the case for luminous YSOs, and it has been proposed that this is due to the presence of an optically thick gaseous disc. We demonstrate that the differential phase observations over the CO bandhead emission are indeed consistent with the presence of a compact (~1 AU) gaseous disc interior to the dust sublimation radius. Conclusions. The observations reveal no sign of binarity. However, the data do indicate the presence of a gaseous disc interior to the dust sublimation radius. We conclude that the data are consistent with the hypothesis that HD 85567 is a YSO with an optically thick gaseous disc within a larger dust disc that is being photo-evaporated from the outer edge.Comment: Accepted for publication in A &