With his characteristically brilliant wordplay and extraordinary scope, Tom Stoppard has in Hapgood devised a play that "spins an end-of-the-Cold-War tale of intrigue and betrayal, interspersed with explanations of the quixotic behavior of the electron and the puzzling properties of light" ( New York Times ). It falls to Hapgood, an extraordinary British intelligence officer, to try to unravel the mystery of who is passing along top-secret scientific discoveries to the Soviets, but as she does so, the web of personal and professional betrayals―doubles and triples and possibly quadruples―continues to multiply.

2012 Reprint of 1935 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. As engaging today as when it originally appeared, this book has two parts. The first describes the colorful life of two artist-puppeteers and their travels through the famine and revolution torn land, into remote oriental provinces. The second is the practical part. It tells just how the author conceives her plays, and make and works her puppets, whether they be hand-puppets, shadow figures or the special hand and rod combination type she evolved. No other book has gone so deeply into the heart of the artist using puppets. The Efimovs invented an original design of puppets on rods, which enabled them, by way of experiment, to stage scenes from "Macbeth".