Byline: Anne McElvoy

THE FATAL LOVER, Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage, By Julie Wheelwright, Collins & Brown, Pounds 16.99

She was the Christine Keeler of her times, but the times being harder, the culmination of her career was not a genteel retirement spent dropping selected morsels to Sunday newspapers, but execution at dawn by firing squad at Vincennes in 1917 at the height of first world war spy fever.

Mata Hari has lived on as an icon of female betrayal, the supreme symbol of male distrust of female sensuality.

The pathetic irony of her life and the thesis of this book is that she no more deserved the fame than the damnation she attracted.

For there was not a thread of proof that Mata Hari, more prosaically Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, had achieved anything more with her horizontal endeavours than the supplies of francs and luxuries she coveted as a demimondaine of declining fortunes, a...