"A mesmerising story. The narrative thread alone compels one to follow the author into the dark labyrinths of Kafka's spooky city of Prague during the cold war. There's immediate page-turning excitement in unraveling the real motives of a man named Jiri Mucha. He seduced the author's mother, the wife of a diplomat in the British embassy in the fifties, and numerous others including the mistress of British Premier Anthony Eden. He may also have destroyed the author's sister. It was Jiri's job. He was what the secret police called a "social agent", code name ANTY, Agent No. 5902, paid to steal blueprints to the hearts of women who had access to men of power. None of this could have been obvious to the author, a child at the time, but one of the charms of the book is the manner in the way we see the lives through fragments of family remembrance. And when the story ends, the exceptional quality of the writing lingers in one's mind like sight of the city's medieval towers through a Prague fog."
– Sir Harold Evans, Editor of The Sunday Times, of London, from 1967 to 1981; President and Publisher of Random House; author of The American Century, and the memoir My Paper Chase.

"A fascinating hunt through Prague for Cold War spies. Much new light is shed on some VENONA cases, including the notorious but mysterious Ian Milner."
– NIGEL WEST, Britain's expert on Cold War espionage, author of Crown Jewels and Counterfeit Spies among many others.

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Born in London and educated in England, Charles Laurence is a former foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph of London who covered conflicts ranging from the Falklands War to the Middle East, India, and Afghanistan before heading the paper's New York bureau. Now an American citizen, he continues to write for British media and lives in Woodstock, New York and the remote Caribbean island of Salt Cay.