Edward Snowden's recent revelations about National Security Agency monitoring have made surveillance a hot political topic. An intriguing consequence of Snowden's disclosures was that sales of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four spiked by 11,000 prercent in the United States, a testimony to the novel's status as the go-to text on surveillance. Yet, as James Smith discusses in this densely researched and enlightening account of MI5 surveillance of British writers between 1930 and 1960, Orwell was drawn into the morally murky world of surveillance shortly before he died in 1950. In 1949 he passed on a list of those he considered not to be trusted to work for the Information Research Department (IRD), a branch of the Foreign Office founded in 1948. The IRD's brief included countering Soviet propaganda and launching “anti-Soviet sorties of its own” (30). When the existence of Orwell's list became widely known after the declassification of IRD files, debates raged between Orwell's supporters and opponents over the ethics and effects of the list. Smith is highly critical of Orwell's judgment in this instance, but his study is a larger and far more interesting examination of how Orwell and other British writers were the targets of surveillance by security agencies, and how some of them occasionally colluded with those agencies. Orwell had suspected that he was being monitored, as did many writers on the Left who saw themselves as enemies of established power structures and elites.

Using recently released MI5 files, Smith provides a fascinating account that confirms many of those suspicions. He approaches this sometimes-startling material with a sober eye, favoring thoughtful examination of the evidence the files provide over tendentious exposés. And he recognizes that that evidence is partial, both in being incomplete (many files remain classified, while others have been destroyed) and in being potentially based on biases and misinterpretations. Those compiling the files often had little knowledge of the writers and artists they monitored, so that their observations and assessments might seriously misread the motivations behind innocent actions, friendships, communications, and writing. And yet, as Smith plausibly shows, the writers to various degrees and in certain circumstances were not wholly innocent either. There need be nothing duplicitous in this; people change their opinions in response to new circumstances. The book's timeframe, 1930–1960, which at first blush might seem blandly innocuous, explains some of those responses, marking the complicated political and personal developments from the Red Decade (always more complex than that label suggests) through the first decade and a half of the Cold War (itself a reductive label). Smith provides the context for these changes, deftly blending an awareness of the larger cultural forces at play with an in-depth understanding of the history and rationale of security agencies. This understanding provides the basis for fine-grained analyses of the individual files where culture and its producers came under security monitoring.

The book's clear format underlines its measured argument. A brief preface offers a history of how the files on which the study is based came into the public realm, while a section on “The Structure of an MI5 File” will prove invaluable for researchers who will no doubt follow the leads Smith opens up. The opening chapter provides the “Intellectual and Intelligence Contexts, 1930–1960,” a smartly observed overview that adds an account of the “British Secret State” (8) to standard literary accounts of the period. Smith shows how the Metropolitan Police's Special Branch, MI5, and the Special Intelligence Service kept tabs on literary journals, suspect writers and publishers, and the political parties to which they were affiliated. He notes the problems such agencies had with “intelligence methodologies” unsuited for judging the “the ideological import of artistic content and its potential political effect” (18). Having established this context, the next three chapters deal successively with “The Auden Circle”; Ewan MacColl, Joan Littlewood, and Theatre Workshop; and George Orwell and Arthur Koestler. The first and third of these chapters might seem to cover well-worked territory, but Smith's concentration on an array of new material contained in the files allows him to explain how some of the “usual suspects” were monitored and often misunderstood by MI5 and others—sometimes comically so.

Integrating this security perspective with his knowledge of the divergent literary aspirations and imperatives that, for example, undermine any sense of a coherent Auden circle, Smith addresses the different ways in which writers such as Auden, Day-Lewis, and Spender reacted to swiftly and sometimes momentously changing circumstances. His readings of certain incidents are provocative, as with Auden's action or inaction in relation to the flight of Guy Burgess to the Soviet Union, or with Stephen Spender's knowledge of whether the Central Intelligence Agency was funding Encounter. On the basis of the files, Smith remains suspicious of Spender's claims of naivety. The chapter on MacColl and Littlewood reveals the extent of security services monitoring of the Theatre Workshop; MacColl's file ran to 150 pages and that on the workshop comprises three volumes. As Smith argues, the extended surveillance seems out of proportion to the impact or motives of the workshop and its guiding lights. And even if MacColl comes across as a somewhat sullied figure, the monitoring he and Littlewood received was, as Smith suggests elsewhere, “over-reaching” (153).

The chapter on Orwell and Koestler charts the complex interactions these two writers had with security agencies, with Koestler's large MI5 file reading “like the plot of a spy thriller” (124). Smith's careful analysis distinguishes fact from fiction. He modestly observes that rather than “an exhaustive analysis of all the questions raised by these new archival resources” (xi), his study “undertakes some of the first steps towards establishing a dialogue between the fields of intelligence history and literary history” (xii). First steps, perhaps, but important ones. This intelligent, balanced, and thoughtfully probing book activates what promises to be a rich and highly revealing dialogue.