Hemingway, the spy

Book review of Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy

Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy

Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961

Nicholas Reynolds

HarperCollins

384 pages; Rs 667

The dust jacket describes Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy as an “international cloak-and-dagger epic” and a “stunning untold story of a literary icon’s dangerous secret life”. Nicholas Reynolds, a former marine, CIA officer and military historian, probably did not contribute to this breathless text — his style is more prosaic. Still, the book should come with a very American statutory warning: Curb your enthusiasm. 

Writer, Sailor … cannot be called sensationally revelatory — nothing here to match, for instance, Margaret Thatcher’s dramatic unmasking in