A revealing look at the interrelationship between secret intelligence agencies and the wider societies and cultures they inhabit Intelligence agencies are traditionally understood as cloistered entities. Hidden behind a veil of secrecy, they conduct their activities relatively free from public scrutiny, and their assessments are ideally detached from the cultural and political biases that pervade our fallen world. Today, however, intelligence services have come in from the cold. They feature routinely in our popular culture and our political debates. Our ideas about them, from 'deep state' conspiracy theories to popular tropes drawn from spy fiction and cinema, have even influenced the outcome of major elections. Likewise, as John Le Carré once put it, intelligence officers do not sit 'like monks in a cell' but are themselves products of the social, political, and cultural domains they inhabit.  Spies, Culture, and Society brings together some of the world's leading experts on