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Culture | Another spy and traitor How erectile dysfunction led a KGB spy into the arms of MI6

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  Culture | Another spy and traitor How erectile dysfunction led a KGB spy into the arms of MI6 In “Redwood” Ben Macintyre shows how personal struggles help recruit informants Save Share A partnership written in the stars Photograph: Courtesy Ian McCredie Oct 15th 2026 | 3 min read Listen to this story AI Narrated Redwood. By Ben Macintyre. Crown; 416 pages; $35. Viking; 464 pages; £25 V LADIMIR KUZICHKIN , a KGB spy who defected to Britain after a harrowing escape from Iran in 1981-82, asked for two things: a horoscope and a circumcision. “Recruiting a vetted circumciser had been hard enough,” writes Ben Macintyre, a historian, but “locating a security-cleared astrologer was impossible”. “Redwood” is the gripping tale of Kuzichkin’s recruitment into MI 6. (“Redwood” was his code name.) It is Mr Macintyre’s latest true-life spy thriller: earlier narratives have looked at Kim Philby, an MI 6 officer who defected to the KGb , among others. It succeeds, like his other books, in meld...
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Obituary | Creation and destruction Annie Dillard wanted to know the mind of God

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  Obituary | Creation and destruction Annie Dillard wanted to know the mind of God The nature writer and “theologian” died on September 15th, aged 81 Save Share Photograph: Courtesy of Hollins University Oct 15th 2026 | 5 min read Listen to this story AI Narrated S he could never forget the moth. It hatched from a cocoon kept by her teacher in a Mason jar, a huge Polyphemus silk moth with, potentially, velvety brown wings bearing a bright blue eyespot. At the moment of hatching, its wings produced a hardening varnish that would enable them to spread. Then it could fly. But the jar was too small, and the varnish worked too fast. The moth, when released on the street, could only walk. But it struggled gamely on with its useless lumps of wings, heading somewhere. In Annie Dillard’s mind, it was still going. She was the only one to see it as it went. She was often a sole observer, quietly noting. A goldfinch shaking a seeding thistle until the down floated, “blind and sweet”, all over...
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An Interview with Czeslaw Milosz

  An Interview with Czeslaw Milosz Czesław Miłosz and Nathan Gardels February 27, 1986 issue The following interview with Czeslaw Milosz took place in Berkeley, California, in August 1985 . The East NATHAN GARDELS: Your poems are very popular today in Poland. Why is poetry so important there? CZESLAW MILOSZ: At moments of cataclysm and upheaval, poetry becomes popular as the expression of the people’s hope, aspirations, and identity. In such moments, poetry is the most expressive voice of freedom. Also, poetry has been popular in Poland for centuries. On the other hand, maybe there are some very down-to-earth reasons. In the Europe occupied by the Nazis, poetry was the most handy instrument of moral resistance because you could copy a poem and pass it from hand to hand. Prose was too long and difficult for this purpose. So there are various reasons, historical and practical. G: In Poland today, it seems that the civil society and the culture belong to the forces of opposition—to S...
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