This story of Soviet agent and his MI6 handler in revolutionary Iran is a page-turning masterpiece

Ben Macintyre uses the acronym MICE to describe the reasons people betray their countries: Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego. In the set-piece that opens his latest work of true-espionage, we discover a new reason: erectile dysfunction.

Stressed, drinking too much, under constant surveillance, furious about the corruption of his colleagues and frustrated with his home life, the KGB’s Vladimir Kuzichkin is offering to betray the secrets of his homeland and its Iranian allies, if only a British doctor can help him have sex again.

Hundreds of millions of pounds of dirty money are being deposited at post offices every year. So why are the police reluctant to investigate the scale of the problem?

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Leicestershire police won’t say who first told them about Jigar Gheewala, but you can see why, once they had heard of him, they decided to find out more. Gheewala was unemployed, had no apparent income, yet lived in a £1.3m house and sent his three children to private school. “He was a declared bankrupt, with a bank account that was absolutely not reflective of what it should be,” said financial crime supervisor Laura Panter of Leicestershire police’s economic crime team. “That was our starting point.”

Over the course of 2020, despite being on benefits, Gheewala’s bank account received more than £880,000 in cash in 200 different deposits. He was, it turned out, a money launderer, but not the kind you’ll see in the movies. Gheewala’s deposits had been made not in Liechtenstein or on Grand Cayman, but at various post office branches in Leicester, one thick wodge of banknotes after another.

A journalist investigates the unsettling world of a charismatic shaman and the people who trusted him

Which, in your opinion, is the worst current cultural trend: social media influencers; unregulated wellness practitioners; macho manosphere posturers; psychedelic bores; cultural appropriators? The good news is that, with Octavio Rettig, the central character in Kimon de Greef’s The Ego Trip, you don’t have to choose between them. He’s all five wrapped into one objectionable package, and so much more besides.

The tale begins with the Sonoran desert toad, an improbable amphibian that spends most of its life hiding underground in the baking badlands along the Mexico-Arizona border, and has done so blamelessly for millions of years. Whenever it rains, the toads emerge from their hiding places to mate, laying strings of eggs wherever water has pooled.

A journalist tells the improbable tale of a British diplomat who worked to free Ireland – and paid the ultimate price

Roger Casement had a life that defies categorisation: an imperial administrator who exposed imperial atrocities; a one-time diplomat for the United Kingdom who enlisted German help in Ireland’s fight for freedom; a closeted gay man who left detailed records of his sexual adventures; a knight of the realm convicted of conspiring against the crown.

TE Lawrence (“of Arabia”), himself no stranger to the hypocrisy of British imperialism and the difficulties of illegal sexuality, called Casement a “broken archangel”. Rory Carroll, the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent, retains some of that poetry in this deeply researched and fascinating account of Casement’s role in the creation of the Irish state.

Innocent people are being frozen out of basic banking services – and it all traces back to reforms rushed through after 9/11

Hamish Wilson lives a few miles away from me, in a cosy farmhouse in the damp hills of mid Wales. He makes good coffee, tells great stories and is an excellent host. Every summer, dozens of Somali guests visit Wilson’s farm as part of a wonderfully wholesome project set up to celebrate their nation’s culture, and to honour his father’s second world war service with a Somali comrade-in-arms.

Inadvertently, however, the project has revealed something else: a deep unfairness in today’s global financial system that not only threatens to ruin the Somalis’ holidays, but also excludes marginalised communities from global banking services on a huge scale.