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George Cochrane: The Book that Saved Bond

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  Jun 2026 Categories Espionage , Literary life Read more by George Cochrane From Kinshasa with Love Don’t Look Now Night & Day Human See, Human Do Wall Street Journals St Cuthbert’s Collage Lost in Translation The Last Picture Show i Print This George Cochrane The Book that Saved Bond   The wisdom of always having a book to hand is nowhere better demonstrated than in the fifth James Bond novel, From Russia, with Love (1957). Bond has just been to Istanbul to extract the supposed Soviet defector Tatiana Romanova. Returning to Britain by the Orient Express, they are joined in their compartment by fellow MI6 operative Captain Nash. Bond settles down with a novel partially set in Istanbul, Eric Ambler’s classic spy thriller The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), but after a few pages falls asleep. On waking, he goes to check the time when Nash, whose real name is Donovan Grant, chief executioner of Soviet counterintelligence and the man sent to kill Bond, shoots his watch. Bond asks ...
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The Real Karl Marx

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NYBooks Logo. Link to Homepage My Account Logout Site logo Politics Collapse Literature Collapse Arts Collapse Ideas Collapse Current Issue Current Issue More from the Review Events All Issues About Us Shop Literary Gifts Shop NYRB Classics The Real Karl Marx John Gray Jonathan Sperber’s ‘Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life’ May 9, 2013 issue Reviewed: Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber Liveright, 648 pp., $35.00 Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny, a left-wing journalist and her father’s secretary, in 1869. ‘The cross she is wearing,’ Jonathan Sperber writes, ‘was not a sign of religious affiliation but the symbol of the Polish uprising of 1863.’ In many ways, Jonathan Sperber suggests, Marx was “a backward-looking figure,” whose vision of the future was modeled on conditions quite different from any that prevail today: The view of Marx as a contemporary whose ideas are shaping the modern world has run its course and it is time for ...
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