Just seven months to go before the publication of M, as it will be in the UK, and Agent M, for everyone in North America – my biography of MI5’s Maxwell Knight.

Here are some generous pre-publication quotes. The first is from Adam Sisman, author of the acclaimed biography of John le Carré, the next from Nigel West, the renowned intelligence expert who has been writing about MI5 and its milieu for many years, and the last one is from Charles Cumming, the brilliant spy novelist and author of the bestselling A Divided Spy.

At last I can announce my next book. Drum roll please… It’s a biography of the great MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight – the naturalist and jazz-obsessive who helped to inspire the James Bond character ‘M’.

The book will be called M.

Here’s a bit more about it all in today’s The Bookseller.

And some more here.

V happy to say that The Ingenious Mr P is now available as an audiobook, read beautifully by James Langton (that’s him above).

Here’s a fascinating review by Keith Jeffery in The Wall Street Journal.

This is really exciting, and not just for the fact that they’ve turned the cover of the book into a turquoise ice lolly – TIMP in Cool Beach Books For Hot Summer Days, by Janet Maslin, in The New York Times.