Bertie Wooster, MI5

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing was, for fifteen years, an idee-fixe of British intelligence:

Lessing’s file opens in Southern Rhodesia in 1943. These are documents from the Southern Rhodesian security service, extracted by MI5 in 1949. The hunt begins with a letter from the air ministry in London in 1944 alerting security about the “Left Club” in Salisbury, Rhodesia’s capital city (now Harare), which has been brought to their notice by the Rhodesian air training group. The club, the informant states, is controlled by a “Mr and Mrs LESSING, the former being a German and the latter a South African”, and is patronised by “persons with foreign accents” as well as a number of RAF personnel. The club is described as “very left” and its discussions are reported to “end in anti-British, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist vapourings”.