What We Are Reading Today: Agent Sonya

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Updated 19 September 2020
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What We Are Reading Today: Agent Sonya

Author: Ben Macintire

Ben Macintire has produced a jaw-dropping book about 20th-century espionage.

“With unparalleled access to Sonya’s diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintire has written a history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers,” said a review in goodreads.com.

“Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI — and she evaded them all,” it added.

The review said her story “reflects the great ideological clash of the 2oth century — between communism, fascism, and western democracy — and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times.”

It added that Sonya, born as Ursula Burton, “was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her.


What We Are Reading Today: The Correspondence

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Updated 02 February 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: The Correspondence

  • During this period, Thoreau was well established as a writer and lecturer, and he continued to pursue the interests and activities that had occupied him earlier in the 1850s

Author: Henry David D. Thoreau

This is the third and final volume of the first full-scale scholarly edition of Thoreau’s correspondence in more than half a century. Together, the volumes present every known letter written or received by Thoreau, almost 650 in all, including more than 100 that have never been published before.

“Correspondence 3: 1857–1862” contains 239 letters, 121 written by Thoreau and 118 written to him. Sixty-seven letters are collected here for the first time; of these, 44 have not been published before, including five dated between 1837 and 1855 that are included in an addenda. 

During this period, Thoreau was well established as a writer and lecturer, and he continued to pursue the interests and activities that had occupied him earlier in the 1850s. 

Letters document the publication of “Chesuncook” (1858) and “An Address on the Succession of Forest Trees” (1860), as well as his preparations, a few months before his death, for the posthumous publication of “The Maine Woods “ and the essays “Walking,” “Autumnal Tints,” “Wild Apples,” and “Life without Principle.”