SPIES AND STARS: MI5, Showbusiness and Me

Wickedly funny, hilarious and candid, we are taken to London in the 1950s. Lottie is a reluctant typist at MI5 and an even more reluctant daughter of the organisation's most illustrious spy. She has had the bad luck to fall in love with Harry, a handsome if frustrated young actor who doubles as one of her father's best undercover agents in the Communist hotbed of British theatre. Together the two young lovers embark on a star-studded venture through the glittering world of theatre, but between missing files, disapproving parents, and their own burgeoning creative endeavours, life is about to become very complicated indeed. Filled with period detail, the teenager tells stories to make herself and other people laugh and one funny story follows another. Bingham wrote her first book Coronet Among the Weeds, her memoir of her life as a debutante, at the age of 19 and it was published in 1963 and became an instant bestseller. Her father John Bingham, the 7th Baron Clanmorris, was a member of MI5 where Charlotte worked as a secretary and was an inspiration for John le Carré's character George Smiley. Charlotte Bingham went on to write 33 internationally bestselling novels and films and TV series including Upstairs Downstairs. Here her prose is in its youthful insouciance, and she writes as an exceptionally observant young lady. 258pp, paperback.