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Now a rather embarrassing confession. I'm reading a book by Len Deighton.

I've always rather liked the Harry Palmer films starring Michael Caine, particularly Funeral in Berlin. Anyway I came across a rather nice hardback edition of the Ipcress File at a National Trust house. Don't worry it was legally acquired, not snatched while my pregnant wife distracted an elderly steward...

Anyway I digress. At the start of Chapter 2 Palmer is walking down London's Charlotte Street towards Soho when he purchased "two packets of Gauloises, sank a quick grappa with Mario and Franco at the Terrazza, bought a Statesman, some Normandy butter and garlic sausage".

Now this got us thinking. The Ipcress File was first published in 1962 - easy to find out if you've got a first edition - so just what could HP have been reading about?

A quick email to walking New Statesman archive, rain expert and media guru Professor Brian Cathcart [4] and we thought we'd worked it out...

To a spy the Vassall affair would have been particularly interesting. John Vassall was a gay civil servant who got photographed in some rather compromising situations with a Soviet citizen enabling the Russians to recruit him as a spy.

He then became a secretary to Tory minister Tam Galbraith which gave him access to all sorts of classified documents which he passed over to the USSR.

Eventually someone realised that Vassall had a rather high standard of living for his salary and it was a top news item for most of autumn 1962.

In a thundering editorial, Paul Johnson wrote about it in the 16 November edition of the NS.

In it Harold Macmillan is castigated by our former editor for regarding the "security chaos in the Admiralty as purely secondary to the political aspects of the affair".

But it can't have been the Vassall piece Palmer was reading. Nor could it have been the review of Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved me from the 11 May edition.

We know this because Deighton refers to Palmer's stroll down Charlotte Street taking place on "that sort of January morning that has enough sunshine to point up the dirt without raising the temperature".

So what could our spy have been reading? Was it Bertrand Russell's defence of unilateral disarmament in the letter pages? Or Johnson's profile of the Cold War Earl - foreign secretary Alexander Douglas-Home? A review of such titles as Lenin's Collected Works and Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx? All were in the 5 January edition. Or perhaps an item on Soviet ideology in the 12 January edition?

Personally I think the clue is in some of the other items Palmer bought.

Deighton wants us to know Palmer is a sophisticate and the reference to the NS indicates that just as surely as the normandy butter shows he is a gourmet.