The Kingdom of the Blind

London, 1916: a German-born gentleman moves in the best houses, dines at the best clubs, and something is going out of England to the enemy through channels the Admiralty cannot find. Oppenheim worked in his father's leather business for twenty years while writing at night, then produced some hundred and fifteen novels from a villa on the Riviera; the wartime paranoia here is contemporary reporting, not hindsight. Fifty-nine plates of painting, among them John Lavery and Spencer Gore, track the dinner parties, clubs and jury rooms of the London that Oppenheim's traitor moves through.