MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

M: MAXWELL KNIGHT, MI5’s GREATEST SPYMASTER by Henry Hemming

(Arrow £9.99) MAXWELL KNIGHT was an unlikely candidate for a career as a spy: his passions were jazz and exotic pets. At various times his menagerie included a toad, a bush baby, a parrot, several grass snakes and a bear named Bessie.

In 1923 he came to the attention of Sir George Makgill, a wealthy baronet whose patriotic inclinations had led him to set up a private intelligence agency.

Working undercover in the British Union of Fascists, Max learned the skills that would eventually take him to MI5. His agents there included the young David Cornwell, later the novelist John le Carre.

After retiring from MI5, Max spent his final years in the public gaze as a TV naturalist. Henry Hemming gives an engrossing account of the remarkable life of a great British eccentric.

THE INNER LIFE OF ANIMALS by Peter Wohlleben

(Vintage £8.99) PETER WOHLLEBEN’S previous book, the international bestseller The Hidden Life Of Trees, explained how trees communicate with each other via a system known as the Wood Wide Web. He has followed it with another bestseller exploring the emotional lives of animals.

Wohlleben argues that creatures are as capable as humans of experiencing emotions such as grief, empathy, shame, love and the intention to deceive.

In a series of entertaining case studies, he explores incidents of animal emotion, including altruistic bats, monogamous ravens, and an embarrassed horse.

He suggests we ‘infuse our dealings with the living beings with which we share our world with a little more respect . . . whether those beings are animals or plants’.

THE SPIDER NETWORK by David Enrich

(Penguin £9.99) ON AUGUST 3, 2015, Tom Hayes, a 36-yearold former City trader, was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud by rigging Libor interest rates, and sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment.

Hayes, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and was nicknamed Rain Man by his colleagues, had pursued a spectacularly successful City career, making a $ 280 million profit for UBS in Tokyo in three years.

To understand his catastrophic fall from grace, the Wall Street journalist David Enrich spent years digging deep into the background of Hayes’s case.

His book, which reads like a gripping financial thriller, concludes that whatever Hayes’s wrongdoing, he was not alone.

‘The more I dug,’ Enrich writes, ‘the more it seemed that . . . Hayes was the hapless guy positioned to take the fall for an entire industry’s era of anarchic, reckless behaviour.’