Bret drank his coffee and thought about it. There was always another layer of onion no matter how deep you went. Well, if it was true, the old man would never admit it, and he was the only one who knew the answer. Bret knew that he could never really become English. They were very strange people: tribal in their complex allegiances. He finished his coffee and dismissed such thoughts from his mind. There was a lot of work to do.

Len Deighton

Len Deighton was born in London in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin's School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. It was while working as a waiter in the evenings that he developed an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate and spectacular success. Since then he has published twenty books of fiction and non-fiction – including spy stories, and highly-researched war novels and histories – all of which have appeared to international acclaim.