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Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

I've read The Spy and the Traitor, and it was quite good. I had just come off a binge of spy novels written by John LeCarre and it was amazing to read the same exact sort of craziness, but in a real life situation. I would actually recommend doing something similar, as the fiction definitely help set the mental stage for the history.

That said, Roger Federer is a generalist?!? Why, because he has trouble beating Rafa on clay?? As a techie generalist who has knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep, I'm not sure he would qualify. But I'll read the book and see.

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> That said, Roger Federer is a generalist?!? Why, because he has trouble beating Rafa on clay??

I don't know why people bother to take umbrage at things without even trying to learn the context. What you are assuming the author claims doesn't exist anywhere in the book.

He never says the Federer is a generalist. The only mention of Federer in the book is to contrast his childhood with Tiger Wood's childhood.

"By the time [Federer] finally gave up other sports—soccer, most notably—to focus on tennis, other kids had long since been working with strength coaches, sports psychologists, and nutritionists. But it didn’t seem to hamper his development in the long run."

In contrast, Tiger Woods famously focused on golf exclusively at an early age.

Woods specialised in golf from a young age. Federer didn't specialise in a single sport from a young age.

Federer is never mentioned again after the 4th page of the book.

Ah. Like I said, I'll read the book and see.

But if you follow Gates link, he writes a whole blog post titled "We need more Rogers: David Epstein’s Range explains the greatness of Roger Federer and other generalists," so I assumed he was featured a bit more prominently.

Did you follow that link and read Gates post before moaning about my comment? Probably not.

Read Spycatcher by Peter Wright.

It's an opinionated tale of someone actually doing the business of catching spies.

Even better for the HN crowd, the author was an engineer so there's some tidbits about just how advanced spook technology was even in the 50s and 60s (i.e. using acoustics to lift encryption keys through embassy walls as they were being typed)

The fact it was banned for a while is also a fairly good indicator that there's something in there worth reading.

The more factual parts are genuinely dangerous if not for the late date it was published.

The more speculative aspects like the authors' judgement of Roger Hollis is genuinely really weird. We will probably never know the truth, but if he wasn't a spy there are some genuinely abnormal correlations to be explained. If you're familiar with the case the Australian intelligence analyst Paul Monk gives a fairly strong case that even if the official story on Hollis isn't wrong, it is wildly inconsistent and economical with the truth.

Wright is a bit of a loose cannon, but the late Chapman Pincher wrote an enormous book on effectively everything publicly known about the (at the age of about 100 no less) which is much more methodical.

There was a IWP panel about the case a few years ago; some evidence is so murky that some analysts were, even with a fastidiously planned and documented "argument map" to summarize the known evidence, joking about resorting to sending a freedom of information request to the GRU.

I think a couple of Macintyre's other works even top The Spy and the Traitor in terms of "craziness". Particularly Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat (out of those I've read). They're both thoroughly worth a read if you enjoyed this one.

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