A British intelligence officer during the First World War, in his fiction Maugham brilliantly captures the moral fogginess of espionage. Gordievsky was particularly taken with the character of Ashenden, a British agent sent to Russia during the Bolshevik revolution: ‘Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness,’ wrote Maugham. ‘People sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to them.’
