https://vegasharmon.com/authors/richard-norton-taylor/ Recent content in Richard Norton-Taylor on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/gin-and-secrets-and-sex/ Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/gin-and-secrets-and-sex/ The author contrasts the privileged lifestyle of the Cambridge spies with the brutality that Stalin meted out to his victims. For the spies, she says, the war was ‘not so bad. Not when they had gin and secrets and sex. And bread.’ More than once she describes the spies as part of a ‘chapocracy’: an establishment whose complacency and incompetence protected spies who dined and drank in the same clubs and were part of the same social network.