Ben Macintyre author photo
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Ben Macintyre

Geboren: December 25, 1963 – Oxford, England, United Kingdom

Ben Macintyre is a British journalist and nonfiction author known for gripping books on espionage, war, and intelligence history. His notable works include Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends, and The Spy and the Traitor. His books have been international bestsellers, with several adapted for television and film.

Biografie & Werdegang des Autors

Ben Macintyre was born in Oxford and came to history through a combination of formal study and journalistic apprenticeship. He read History at St John’s College, Cambridge, later studied at Columbia University as a Harkness Fellow, and moved from Columbia Journalism School into a career at The Times. Reporting in New York, Paris, and Washington gave him the habits of a foreign correspondent: close observation, a feel for character, and a strong sense of narrative momentum. Before he became most closely associated with intelligence history, his books ranged across explorers, criminals, and political curiosities, revealing an early fascination with people who lived just outside the center of official history. ((https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/about-us/news-and-research/post-office-scandal-judge-espionage-historian-and-slow-horses-tv-executive-among-new-honorary-fellows))

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Zitate

quote
You create an invisible imagined world and you try to lure someone else into it
-Amanpour interview on Operation Mincemeat
quote
As a writer and a journalist, your job is to expose secrets, really, not to keep them
-Ben Macintyre on Moscow's Agent Sonya
quote
Here was a perfect circle of espionage
-The double agent who changed the course of history
quote
The KGB was unapologetically unprincipled
-The Spy and the Traitor
quote
When she hopped onto her bike with her ration book and carrier bags, Mrs Burton was going shopping for lethal secrets
-Agent Sonya
quote
In Nazi Germany, insufficient friendliness was a crime
-Colditz
quote
But the siege was more complicated than that, and much more extraordinary
-The Siege

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Stimmen der Community

"Ben Macintyre has established himself as the pre-eminent historian of the secret world"

Mick Herron

"A Spy Among Friends is the latest in Ben Macintyre’s series on twentieth-century espionage. All are superb"

The New Yorker

"Ben Macintyre has written a series of books that reveal no important new secrets, but captivate as story-telling"

The Sunday Times

"Ben Macintyre tells Chapman's tale in a perfect pitch"

The Observer

"But Ben Macintyre manages to retell it in a way that makes Philby’s destructive genius fresh and horridly fascinating"

The Washington Post

"Ben Macintyre’s rollicking, spellbinding Agent Zigzag blends the spy-versus-spy machinations of John le Carré with Evelyn Waugh"

The New York Times

"With the panache of a born storyteller, Ben Macintyre explores what drove Kim Philby"

The Guardian

"Ben Macintyre’s factual account is more gripping than what you will find anywhere else"

The Washington Times

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