Steven Hunt

The third instalment in Boyd’s detective trilogy featuring Gabriel Dax, the nonchalant travel writer, British spy and occasional double agent, sends our unlikely hero on yet more unexpected escapades in the service of British intelligence. It's 1964 and more Cambridge spies have been unmasked. From Los Angeles and Moscow to Leningrad and the tiny Greek island of Icarios, Dax travels ostensibly in pursuit of material for his writing, but in reality at the behest of the mysteri

Agrippa, the new novel by Robert Harris, is a supposed autobiography of the famous Roman general Marcus Agrippa, right hand man and personal friend of the Emperor Augustus, and military genius behind many of his victories, including the Battle of Actium fought against Anthony and Cleopatra in 31BC which, as they say, changed the direction of history forever. The Augustus portrayed here is very much an antidote to that portrayed in the BBC I, Claudius TV series, where he comes

I walked into the Bridge Theatre in London on Saturday not entirely sure what I was expecting from Simon Stone’s Oresteia. I know Aeschylus’ Oresteia pretty well - professionally. It’s a trilogy I’ve lived with for decades, ever since seeing Peter Hall’s famously austere National Theatre production in 1981 and then reading or teaching (I think) all of it over the years, some in Greek and all in translation. At seventeen I was frankly overwhelmed by Hall’s production with its