The Social Agent

Prague in the 1950s was "a city of fear and spies and sooty fogs," Charles Laurence writes in the opening lines of The Social Agent. As the son of the No. 2 man at the British embassy in Prague, Mr. Laurence observed with wide eyes a great deal during the years his family lived there. And he had to guess at a good deal more. Written long after these troubling years, The Social Agent is at once a meticulous dissection of fact and memory and a lyrical evocation of a now vanished world.