A decade ago, while attending a conference in an unprecedentedly prosperous and westernised Moscow, I went to interview the British KGB double agent George Blake in his dacha outside town. It was meant to be just a newspaper article, but it spiralled out of control, and my biography of him appeared last year. Other recent books of mine emerged from running into the right people at conferences in Doha and Istanbul, another city that has since almost dropped out of the international ideas exchange.
10年前,在空前繁榮、西化的莫斯科參加會議時,我在英國和克格勃(KGB)雙面間諜喬治?布萊克(George Blake)位于城外的別墅采訪了他。那次本來只是為了寫一篇報紙文章,但卻一發不可收拾,而我關于他的傳記也于去年出版。我最近寫的其他書也是在多哈和伊斯坦布爾的會議上遇到合適的人之后寫的。伊斯坦布爾是另一個幾乎退出了國際思想交流的城市。