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Moscow, centre of Russian power and a city I knew better than London, would be at the epicentre of my story. I’ve just been to the packed launch party of her fourth novel, The Translator, flagged by both the Times and the Sunday Times as their Thriller of the Month. In 1957 he had resigned from the Labour Party and had been adopted as Conservative candidate in 1959. Crawley was well known on the television screen and had been a much-favoured young minister in the Attlee government when he was a Labour MP for Buckingham, 1945-51, as Under-Secretary for Air.
As the story develops though, I kept wondering why, if there are only a handful of transatlantic giga-data cables, the PM needed someone in Moscow to tell her where they make landfall. She married Laurence Charles Kevin Kelly, son of Sir David Victor Kelly and Renee Marie-Noele de Jouda de Vaux, on 20 April 1963. Clive happens upon an old lover, Marina, interpreter to the Russian President, who plays games and is apparently slow to recognise him. Marina stuns Clive with the news that she's ready to help the UK to stop the attack, betraying her country for a new identity and a new life.Soon, he’s back down south, they’ve kitted him out with a new diplomatic passport, new suit etc, and a four week supply of insulin, for Clive is diabetic; everything has been catered for. This throws up some really thought-provoking issues around language and interpretation that I have not considered before - not only around the speed that translators of speech have to work at, but how their choice of words can influence the meaning of very tricky situations. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.
The central character voted for her because he "is tired of men destroying the planet", he voted for her merely "because she was a woman". North ends the novel with an encouraging suggestion that it may be possible to live as one chooses and not as a prisoner of one’s background and experiences. A highly topical thriller about a Russian plot to cut the undersea communication cables linking the US to the UK. Connie is remarkably emotional in her work and also remarkably credulous, but that does not spoil the pace and tension of this novel, Connie’s touching back story or the relationships she develops with other individuals in the institution. Her brilliant and elegant American mother, Virginia Cowles, had been one of the great war correspondents of the Second World War before turning her hand to history and biography – until her death in a car crash in 1983.The author is to be joined by a former British ambassador to Russia, Sir Roderic Lyne, on a tour to discuss the political relevence of her novel. But she is determined to find out who really killed Liam, in spite of the risk of being sent back to prison. Within a few years she and her brothers had started an art business, and were living first in Tehran, then in Hong Kong, then travelling the world. At the centre of the story, we have two characters in Clive and Marina who are not spies, and yet the nature of their jobs brings them into contact with the constant push and pull of the intelligence whirlwind that operates around them as they go about their work, and Crawley uses this to perfection to craft a story full of glorious underlying tension.
Harriet Crawley’s The Translator, has been described by Antony Beever as ‘a classic thriller of the new Cold War’. He left ITN after a row when the company tried to trim down the news operations and rejoined the BBC.
Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited. Clive and Marina's relationships shed light on so many aspects of the mass of contradictions that make up modern Russia, from the cynical machinations of the corridors of the Kremlin, through the rise of the oligarchs, and right down to the political unrest on the streets.
These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. A fluent Russian speaker, Harriet was married to a Russian, sent her son to state school in Moscow, and worked for almost twenty years in the energy sector.
As Rishi Sunak identified some years ago, in today’s internet-based society such an attack would be devastating.
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