Helen Fry

I am endlessly fascinated by what makes a person betray their country. Growing up I was fascinated by… The Tudors. I had a charismatic history teacher who taught me a lot about the Tudor and medieval times – so not the period I’m writing about now. I also enjoyed reading the novels of Eleanor Alice Burford, who fictionalised the Tudor period under the pen name Jean Plaidy. I used to love that kind of thing. My favourite period or conflict… I’m interested in the broad 20th century, from World War I to the Cold War – because we’re still discovering so much. When I learnt history at school, we thought we had a picture of everything there was to know