Nick's Reviews > Stars and Spies

A fun book with a broad historical sweep for those who like, well, stars and spies. And who doesn't? We learn about spies from Elizabethan England to the modern day, and celebrities from almost that wide a time period. The only complaint I have is that, in order to get all the way up to the present day the authors had to accelerate rapidly in the 20th century, and especially the 21st. Now, there is a lot more information available elsewhere on more recent times, but still the treatment of modern-day espionage from the US/UK side to China and Russia felt a bit cursory. Great stories are picked up, and dropped, sometimes within a paragraph. It might have been billed as an encyclopedia, if those items were still in fashion. The entries could have been alphabetical as well as chronological. Still, it's a minor complaint, and one the authors address clearly from the start. So, unlike the dupes that fall into the honey traps of both sides of the Atlantic, and Asia too, we can't say we weren't warned.