PEOPLE AND THINGS
By HAROLD NICOLSON
ALTHOUGH I enjoy detective novels, I am bored by spy-stories. I find it hard to account for this difference in appreciation. It may be that the spies whom I have met have been dull and furtive people, with wet lips and shifting, greedy eyes. It may be that a long experience of the Foreign Service has led me to regard as ignorant those romances which attribute to the grisaille of diplomacy colours and adventures which that admirable, but somewhat bourgeois, profession does not in fact possess. Or it may be that, having but few criminal instincts, I am funda- mentally upon the side of law and order, and that I prefer the triumphs of the detective to the split sympathies which most spy-stories arouse. I realise that my attitude towards spy-stories, whether in fiction or in real life, is one of patronising scepticism. I am conscious, and ashamed, of the fact that when am- told a spy-story my lips shape themselves into a professional sneer. I am aware that throughout the Fifth Column chatter of the last two weeks I have indulged, not only in a suspension of belief, but in a definitely contemptuous mood of incredulity. Am I justi- fied in regarding the danger as exaggerated?
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