'McEwan acknowledges his debt to the historian David Martin for the true story of the Berlin Tunnel or Operation Gold, the abortive brainchild of the CIA and MI6. To this truth of savage farce, McEwan has impressively and impassively wedded a fiction of tragedy, a love story of a sort, of many sorts. . . The Quiet Englishman, Leonard Marnham, is not just innocent, he is an innocent abroad, lodged in the heated poisonous atmosphere of a modern day Jacobean play, intriguing and intrigued' Christoper Ricks, Sunday Correspondent.
