Barcelona in 1912 is a city still recovering from the dramatic incidents of the so-called 'Tragic Week' when Catalan conscripts bound for the unpopular war in Spanish Morocco had rebelled at the city's dockside against the royalist forces. In the fighting many were killed and afterwards even more were thrown into prison. Including an Englishman, who was later found dead in his cell. The dead man had been a prominent businessman in Gibraltar. So what had he been doing...
Tom Baker stars in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of John le Carré’s powerful thriller. In the third year of perestroika, London publisher Barley Blair is sent a manuscript from Moscow. Exposing Russian nuclear threats as a sham, the information - if it’s genuine - could shatter East-West relations. Jazz-loving, hard-drinking Blair is hardly the spymasters’ idea of the perfect agent, yet they are forced to send him to Moscow to make contact. But the Cold War thaws...