Long before Aldous Huxley presented his remarkable synthesis of the development of the Soviet state, his extrapolations from scientific developments, his reading of social theory and his observations of the industrialising United States, in Brave New World, the Russian Revolution had provided a topic for fiction and had also, in the memoirs and first-hand accounts it generated, produced a vocabulary for presenting that world which combined vast landscapes, adventurous journeys, spying and disguise, and a host of other tropes which would continue to echo in the adventure and spy fiction of later decades. Ian Fleming's James Bond is often considered to have been based on the so-called ‘Ace-of-Spies’, Sidney Reilly, drawn from anecdotes passed to Fleming by his friend and Reilly's collaborator in Russia, Robert Bruce Lockhart. Bruce Lockhart's famous and best-selling Memoirs of a British Agent (1932) – so-titled even though Lockhart was basically a diplomat, not a secret agent – appeared at the very end of the period under consideration here, but Paul Dukes’ Red Dusk and the Morrow (1922), the account of the activities of the former chief of British Intelligence in Russia, presented one of the most remarkable spy stories of modern time. Many works of fiction which deal directly or indirectly with the revolution are of slight literary interest, although their contribution to the accretional collective imaginary is significant, and some works of fiction have only the thinnest basis in the country and its events or history, and rely on the broadest evocation of the revolutionary world. Yet even these are symptomatic of the extent to which revolutionary Russia quickly inhabited the imaginary as a place of threat with regard to its state machinery, its people and its impenetrable spaces. This is evident in Edgar Jepson's fairly generic adventure novel A Prince in Petrograd (1921), in which the protagonist goes to Petrograd in order to free his son-in-law from prison. His potential contacts turn out all to be dead, in prison or living in fear of arrest; he is hungry and alone, and the environment almost entirely hostile: ‘I took the commonsense view of my situation, that I was in an enemy country […] I regarded as my natural prey any and every agent, or supporter, of the infernal government.’