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. As Mr. Laurence bravely recalls the bitterness and heartbreak of his family's glittering though tragic years behind the Iron Curtain, his story turns into a most intriguing tale of espionage. At the center of the story is a man whose magnetism, sensuality, and romance were legendary in postwar Europe: Jiri Mucha, son of the famed artist Alphonse Mucha and a man for whom everything was possible, including deceit, surveillance, and manipulation in his role as a social agent.
Author´s text on the same topic (Times online)
Review
Looking back at the espionage game in 1950s Prague, Lawrence, whose father was a high-ranking British diplomat, places his family squarely in a social and historical context amid repressive secret police, family secrets, and tragedy. A former foreign correspondent for the London Telegraph, Lawrence paints candid portraits of his cool, aloof father, his emotionally needy mother, and his older sister, who was starving herself to death. One of the most fascinating characters is double agent Jiri Mucha, the flamboyant son of famed art nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha, who is at the core of the narrative. He had friendships with such luminaries as Philip Roth, Peter Ustinov, Andy Warhol, Graham Greene, and Dylan Thomas. Researching old spook files, Lawrence tries to uncover whether Mucha spied for the Czech secret police and seduced Lawrence's mother, and he finds many more questions than answers. A snapshot of a time and place filled with spies, Stalinist tyranny, and deadly Iron Curtain antics, Lawrence's recollections of his family and their bittersweet taste of the Czech diplomatic life are crisp and pull no punches—about Mucha or his own family. (From Publishers Weekly, Mar. 2010)
