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Culture home Len Deighton, who has died aged 97, was acclaimed “the poet of the spy novel”, having almost single-handedly rescued spy fiction from the flashy, tuxedo-clad, womanising, snobbish and – some said – sadistic world of James Bond and refashioned it into something altogether grittier and more realistic. Whereas Bond was a sophisticated gentleman bully, the unnamed anti-hero of Deighton’s first book, The Ipcress File (1962), was, in the words of one critic, “a working-class boy from Burnley, opposed to authority, who dislikes or distrusts anybody outside his own class”. Early in The Ipcress File, Deighton made his bolshie narrator’s feeling of social exclusion plain: “Dalby tightened a shoe-lace. ‘Think you can handle a tricky little special assignment?’
Published: March 17, 2026 10:37 am
Source: The Telegraph — Read original