A Perfect Spy?

“A right chancer.” That’s what my father, z”l, an East London street kid to his very core, would have called Sidney Reilly, and not without a tinge of admiration. It takes one to know one, I reckon, but the portrait that emerges from Benny Morris’s Sidney Reilly: Master Spy is less a rendering of a spy than it is of an opportunist, a risk-taker, and a smooth-talking charm merchant (his bewildering web of love affairs and marriages warrants a book in their own right) with an instinct for being in the right place at the right time. Until he wasn’t. This is a man whom nobody ever really knew. And Reilly, it seems, wanted it that way.