Who knew? That one of the greatest spies before the Second World War was a Canadian? That one of MI6’s stalwart assets had been a champion debater at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick? That this master of the espionage arts wrote the school’s “Alma Mater Song”? That after playing Hamlet, serving as class president, and graduating as valedictorian in 1904, he went on to study philosophy in the university town of Göttingen, Germany? And that he was one of the first to recognize that the upheaval in that country in the wake of the First World War threatened to unsettle all of Europe and could lead to something like the Nazi tragedy?
Who knew? Almost nobody until now — until Jason Bell, a philosophy professor at the University of New Brunswick, spent fifteen years conducting interviews, rummaging through archives, and examining formerly classified papers to recreate the life of a man named Winthrop Bell (no relation to the author), known in the...
David Marks Shribman teaches in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He won a Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting in 1995.
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