Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Frances Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show

for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest to date is

a journalist for the financial times and now the author of the happy traitor Simon Cooper welcome

to Trigonometry. It's an honest to be here. This is the very first interview I've done in English

about this book and I did not know that you two existed apart from Kilkenomics the festival where

I always meet you. So it's great to see that you are real people. Thank you very much. There are a

lot of people who think we're controlled opposition and avatars created by the government. So

we do exist. Tuis Shields and there's all sorts of other options. Whatever you decide of the

political spectrum you hate us from. But enough about our Simon, you've written a brilliant book.

I've always enjoyed your commentary anyway. You've written about football quite a lot and about

many other subjects. But the happy traitor is a biography of George Blake, the double agent.

Before we get into that, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, how are you where you are?

What was your interest in writing this book and so on? Well, I spent most of my life writing for

the financial times. I used to write sports stuff and I write political and cultural stuff about

how the world is coming to an end, as we all know. And I am quite an international person like

you Constantine and I grew up mostly in the Netherlands by chance. My dad had a job there.

And so about 20 years ago I read an article in Holland about this KGB agent who was

British Dutch in origin. He grown up in Holland, British Egyptian jurist father and he had

ended up George Blake, a KGB agent jailed in Britain and escaped to Moscow. And I thought,

what an amazing story. That was the first I had. I must interview this guy one day because I grew

up about 20 miles away from him in the Netherlands, also Jewish, also British, also speaking Dutch as

he did. So eager to eageristically I saw a lot of similarities between me and Blake.

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