THE FOLIO SOCIETY

'Spies', if you believe Stella Rimington, 'never sleep'. Perhaps because they are always dipping into The Spy's Bedside Book - a thrilling compendium of fiction, memoir and autobiography with a mission to keep one awake into the small hours.

Graham Greene worked for MI6 during the Second World War; his brother Hugh was a foreign correspondent and one of the last Allied journalists to leave Berlin in 1939 - so they knew the spying game from within. Their anthology, published at the height of the Cold War, inhabits the shadows of cloak-and-dagger paranoia, so much so that East German Intelligence, believing they had stumbled upon trade secrets, promptly ordered 100 copies.

As Stella Rimington, the first female head of MI5, reminds us in her introduction, nowhere is it harder to distinguish truth from fiction than in espionage. After all, what could be more ludicrous than Sir Robert Baden-Powell, capering around the Balkans with a butterfly net, secreting the plans of fortifications in his drawings? Yet it happened, along with a host of other real-life exploits of agents, from Major André in the American Revolution to Mata Hari in the First World War and Walter Schellenberg in the Second. We learn the hazards of spies' lives and the tricks of their trade: how to hide messages in a hard-boiled egg and why it is wise to add pepper to your vodka when in Russia.

No book of espionage would be complete without such glamorous, fictional heroes as Duckworth Drew, Richard Hannay and James Bond. Their impeccable suits, armoured attaché cases and devastating way with the ladies are burned into the popular imagination. Drew, trussed and bound in a sealed room with only an exploding oil lamp for company can still escape, while Bond unscrews a tube of shaving cream to 'reveal the silencer for the Beretta'