Dr David Burke is probably the only historian ever to have had a careerchanging experience in Milton Keynes bus station. On Saturday 11 September 1999 he was on his way from Leeds to have lunch with Melita ‘Letty’ Norwood in Bexleyheath. To his astonishment, while changing buses at Milton Keynes, he saw Mrs Norwood's photograph on the front page of The Times with the memorable caption, ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Co-op’, which he has aptly chosen as the title of his biography. The Times that day began serialising The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, which I had written in collaboration with the dissident KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, who had escaped to Britain with a hoard of KGB material, including notes on Mrs Norwood's file. But The Times was not the only newspaper interested in her extraordinary career as Britain's longest-serving Soviet spy. On looking round the newsstand at Milton Keynes, Dr Burke saw Mrs Norwood's photograph on the other front pages too, with the exception of Sporting Life. By the time he had got over his shock at the revelation of her involvement in espionage, he had missed his bus.

Mrs Norwood, meanwhile, was preoccupied but surprisingly unintimidated by the massed ranks of reporters outside her end-of-terrace house. ‘Oh dear’, she told The Times reporter, the only one allowed inside her house. ‘This is so different from my quiet little life. I thought I’d got away with it. But I’m not that surprised it's finally come out.’ ‘Letty’ Norwood had been offered accommodation elsewhere before the media storm broke, but decided to stay and face the reporters. The image of the great-granny spy walking down her garden path between well-tended rose trees to make a televised confession, despite the fact that it was distinctly (if unsurprisingly) economical with the truth, briefly caught the imagination of millions of viewers and newspaper readers. ‘I’m 87’, she began, ‘and unfortunately my memory is not what it was. I did what I did not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, given them education and a health service.’

‘Letty’ Norwood was instantly inundated with lucrative media offers for her life story. She turned all of them down.