Shall I hit him again, Adam?!
I've decided to take this weekend to dive back into Christopher Andrew's The Defense of the Realm, which I abandoned in October for - I don't know why, the point is it's raining like crazy, I am sick, and I miss spies.
Anyway, in the chapter about MI5's transition between wars from a War Office department to a real Security Service, so I come across this small gem:
[Jane] Sissmore's successor as the Security Service's most influential woman in the 1940s and 1950s was to be the redoubtable Milicent Bagot, a classics graduate from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, who joined the Service from Scotland Yard as a twenty-four-year-old secretary in 1931 at the same time as [Hugh] Miller and [Guy] Liddell (and is believed to be the model for John le Carre's character Connie). Like Sissmore, Bagot was to become the Service's leading expert in Soviet Communism and its allies, gradually acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge which impressed even J. Edgar Hoover. Unlike Sissmore, Bagot was never in danger of being described a "court jester." She was a powerful personality who did not suffer fools or the ignorant gladly; some found her intimidating. Her main recreation was music; she habitually left the office promptly on Tuesdays to sing in a choir.
1. I really do love everything about what this paragraph chooses to be.
2. SO IN OTHER WORDS, RUTH EVERSHED WAS A REAL PERSON.
3. That explains the leftovers that went on to make Connie (Spooks, not le Carre), too, then, I suppose.
Anyway, in the chapter about MI5's transition between wars from a War Office department to a real Security Service, so I come across this small gem:
[Jane] Sissmore's successor as the Security Service's most influential woman in the 1940s and 1950s was to be the redoubtable Milicent Bagot, a classics graduate from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, who joined the Service from Scotland Yard as a twenty-four-year-old secretary in 1931 at the same time as [Hugh] Miller and [Guy] Liddell (and is believed to be the model for John le Carre's character Connie). Like Sissmore, Bagot was to become the Service's leading expert in Soviet Communism and its allies, gradually acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge which impressed even J. Edgar Hoover. Unlike Sissmore, Bagot was never in danger of being described a "court jester." She was a powerful personality who did not suffer fools or the ignorant gladly; some found her intimidating. Her main recreation was music; she habitually left the office promptly on Tuesdays to sing in a choir.
1. I really do love everything about what this paragraph chooses to be.
2. SO IN OTHER WORDS, RUTH EVERSHED WAS A REAL PERSON.
3. That explains the leftovers that went on to make Connie (Spooks, not le Carre), too, then, I suppose.