RSS
|
|
|
It is a novel that "owes a lot to the wonderful adventure novels of writers like Rider Haggard, that were a staple of Victorian Britain"; perhaps more significantly, it was a spy novel that "established a formula that included a mass of verifiable detail, which gave authenticity to the story � the same ploy that would be used so well by John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John le Carré and many others." Ken Follett called it "the first modern thriller." The Observer, in a "fundamentally English" list published to coincide with the Big Read campaign in 2003, listed the book on its list of "The 100 Greatest Novels" from the past 300 years. |