About this deal
She married Andrew Crawley, son of Aidan Merivale Crawley and Harriet Virginia Spencer Cowles, in 1986. At the British Embassy, Clive learns of a pending Russian assault on undersea cables linking the US to the UK which would paralyse Western communications. I did enjoy this book because it is page-turningly easy and there is literally nothing difficult about the plot. Clive is brought urgently back to work, to accompany a delegation to Moscow, headed by the Prime Minister.
This throws up some really thought-provoking issues around language and interpretation that I have not considered before - not only around the speed that translators of speech have to work at, but how their choice of words can influence the meaning of very tricky situations. In 1945, he married the sometime war correspondent Virginia Cowles (24 August 1910 – 6 September 1983), [15] [16] daughter of the controversial [17] society doctor Edward Spencer Cowles MD, [18] with whom he had 3 children. a successful author and former television presenter of Collecting Now, married Gleb Shestakov in 1993 and then Julian Ayer in around 2001. Clive Franklin, a Russian language expert in the Foreign Office, is summoned unexpectedly to Moscow to act as translator for the British Prime Minister. On reading this book, one could be forgiven for thinking you have heard all of it before, because, unless you avoid all uk news, you most probably have heard it all before.
The characters were well built through the novel and I found myself routing for Clive and Marina and thoroughly disliking General Varlamov.
On its initial submissions, even though it was in the hands of a top literary agent, the novel hit the buffers. Soon, he’s back down south, they’ve kitted him out with a new diplomatic passport, new suit etc, and a four week supply of insulin, for Clive is diabetic; everything has been catered for. Her foster son, a hacker, has been done in after discovering compromising information about a powerful player in the Kremlin regime, and now she wants out. He is planning to cut Britain’s underwater internet cables and trusts Marina absolutely — which is a mistake, for she wants out. At the embassy, Clive learns of a pending Russian assault on undersea cables linking the US to the UK which would paralyse communications and collapse the Western economy.
Her chance comes when her former flame Clive Franklin (Hugh Grant, if they ever film it) arrives in Moscow as the translator for a British delegation. When they meet each other over the table during talks the next day, both will be surprised, but able to not show an inkling. He joined the Auxiliary Air Force in 1936, and was a trained fighter pilot at start of the Second World War.