What You Can Learn from a Great Spy Novel

Bradley talks to Michael Idov, author of The Cormorant Hunt , about how his own life — coming to the US from Latvia at age 16, running a café on the Lower East Side into the ground, getting discovered by Nora Ephron and moving to Moscow as editor of GQ Russia — feeds his fiction, as well as the passage from his novel that turned Bradley into a superfan: "The left-right distinction, he kept having…