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Excerpt from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY   Jan. 18, 2010

The Social Agent:
A True Intrigue of Sex, Spies, and Heartbreak Behind the Iron Curtain
Charles Lawrence. Ivan R. Dee, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-56663-845-6

Looking back at the espionage game in 1950s Prague, Lawrence, whose father was a high-ranking British diplomat, places his family squarely in a social and historical context amid repressive secret police, family secrets, and tragedy. A former foreign correspondent for the London Telegraph, Lawrence paints candid portraits of his cool, aloof father, his emotionally needy mother, and his older sister, who was starving herself to death. One of the most fascinating characters is double agent Jiri Mucha, the flamboyant son of famed art nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha, who is at the core of the narrative. He had friendships with such luminaries as Philip Roth, Peter Ustinov, Andy Warhol, Graham Greene, and Dylan Thomas. Researching "old spook files," Lawrence tries to uncover whether Mucha spied for the Czech secret police and seduced Lawrence's mother, and he finds many more questions than answers. A snapshot of a time and place filled with spies, Stalinist tyranny, and deadly Iron Curtain antics, Lawrence's recollections of his family and their bittersweet taste of the Czech diplomatic life are crisp and pull no punches--about Mucha or his own family. (Mar.)

"Charles Laurence illuminates the dark years that reshaped the world as he tracks his family story through childhood memories of his father's Cold War diplomatic career. With sympathy but without otiose sentiment, he unearths a true story of the era that inspired John le Carre's tales of George Smiley, then recounts it in compelling and beautifully crafted prose. "George Mucha, the Czech spy and dissident whose father's art was an inspiration for the Swinging Sixties, was the "social agent" whose seductive proclivities were directed by the Czech Secret Service - against Laurence's mother among many others. She and Laurence's father were caught in a sticky web of espionage that seemed to entangle even the spiders who wove it. Deceit and serial betrayals, personal, sexual and political, inflict casualties on the most innocent of by-standers, most notably Laurence's sister. "Idealists become cynical, spymasters become sentimental, and Laurence becomes wiser as he delves deeper, discovering surprising connections of espionage spanning the globe, but at its core is his family and its connection with Czechoslovakia, the epicenter of modern geopolitics from Munich to the rapidly blighted Prague Spring."

– IAN WILLIAMS, author, columnist and senior analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, and editor of the Catskill Review of Books

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