Spies, moles and an odd old dialect

If you read one book this week

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury) R280

You know the story; it has been told many times, and there's nothing new here. British intelligence files on Kim Philby, the high-level Cold War spy and Soviet mole, and his fellow Cambridge double agents remain sealed. But never has their story been told as engagingly as this, or with as much withering scorn for the inbred world of privilege and class from whence they came. It reads like a novel by Graham Greene or John le Carré - with a dash of PG Wodehouse for good measure - and you have to remind yourself it is all fact. Hugely entertaining.

The issue

There was something a wee bit precious and petty about concerns that, for the first time in its history, the Man Booker Prize would be opened up to writers from beyond Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth. The Americans were now in it, and their presence, the grumbling went, would come at the expense of the Commonwealth writers who, as the BBC put it, would be "edged out", and authors with smaller, independent and more experimental publishers. Well, as it turned out, five of the 13 novels long-listed last week were American, and only one was from the Commonwealth: The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.

But, as for "independent and experimental" entries, Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake, an 11th-century saga of the Anglo-Saxon world crumbling in the aftermath of the 1066 Norman invasion, has set a very high bar indeed. It was published by Unbound, a small company that allows authors to crowd-fund their books in exchange for half the proceeds. Conventional publishers turned down The Wake because it was written entirely in a cod Anglo-Saxon dialect, and Kingsnorth refused to rewrite it in modern English.

Here's the novel's opening paragraph : "songs yes here is songs from a land for-heawan folded under by a great slege a folc harried beaten a world brocen apart. all is open lic a wound unhealen and grene the world open and grene all men apart from the heorte. deofuls in the heofun all men with sweord when they sceolde be with plough the ground full not of seed but of my folc."

Not for nothing has one critic said of the novel: "It's a book you have to be patient with. It takes a while to get the voice locked in and you're bound to miss the odd nuance and have to go back on yourself. This is not the sort of thing you just dip into on the Tube - it's not Fifty Shades of Grey."

The bottom line

"He was a strangely hidden man. On stage and on screen he could give an impression of openness, brilliance, lightness and speed. In fact, he was the opposite." - Olivier by Philip Ziegler (MacLehose Press)