The Spy's Bedside Book, edited by Hugh and Graham Greene

Deftly edited by Graham Greene, who was actively employed by MI6, and his brother Hugh, who was best known as director-general of the BBC, it provides tips on things like concealing messages in hard-boiled eggs. Now updated, it has an introduction by Stella Rimington in which the former head of MI5 tries to impose some order on this capricious miscellany. We see Fleming's James Bond coolly sprinkling pepper into his vodka to neutralise the poison he suspects it contains, and discover one (real) British spy who posed as a butterfly collector while wandering among enemy positions, encoding maps into what appeared to be drawings of butterflies.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

On its first appearance in 1957, Hugh and Graham Greene's "The Spy's Bedside Book" provoked a storm of interest, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, 100 copies were bought by East German Intelligence. This classic anthology, with a new introduction by the former head of MI5, Stella Rimington, includes stories by some of the great writers on spying and many practitioners, including Ian Fleming and John Buchan, Sir Robert Baden-Powell and Belle Boyd, Walter Schellenberg and Major Andre, Sir Paul Dukes and Vladimir Petrov, and from the golden age of mystery and suspense, William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim. There are also some unexpected figures: William Blake, D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann, all suspected of spying in three great wars. How can you hide messages in a boiled egg? Why should you always put pepper in your vodka when in Russia? Answers to these questions and much more can be found in this thrilling collection, which will enthrall readers once again with its tales of espionage from a bygone era.