What to read after My Life as a Spy?

In the spring of 1956, like two million other men of his generation, the eighteen-year-old Leslie Woodhead received a summons to serve Her Majesty. National Service signalled the end of boyhood. But it was the beginning of his 'life as a spy'. An only child, living above a shop in a repressed post-war Halifax, Leslie Woodhead grew up with austerity and secrets. But nothing prepared him for the comically bleak RAF training camps he now found himself in, nor the isolated, brutally cold Joint Services School for Linguistics on the east coast of Scotland. Here he was trained as a foot soldier in the Cold War by a colourful staff of emigres, who taught a course of total immersion in Russian for purposes not always clear to their pupils. A posting to an ex-Luftwaffe base in a war-scarred Berlin provided only partial explanations. In the ruins of a city gripped by espionage and paranoia, Woodhead discovered adulthood and his vocation as an observer and documenter of people. Leslie Woodhead has written a memoir of what it was like to be hurled into maturity in the fifties amidst the peculiar circumstances of the early Cold War. He also documents his rediscovery of his own past as he comes to investigate what exactly it was he had been a part of. In the process he has uncovered a little-known slice of Cold War history and a personal tale of how our lives can be formed by events and experiences we barely comprehend at the time.