It is an irony that she herself would have revelled in: Barbara Pym, the author who punctured the social strictures of 20th-century Britain, worked as a censor during the second world war. But research suggests that rather than just poring over the private letters that must have helped hone her talent, she may have also been working for MI5. New work by Claire Smith published this week proposes that Pym’s time as an “examiner” for the government and in the navy could be more than a poacher-turned-gamekeeper tale about a future satirist. Smith said: “In one of her novels, she...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
