THE SPY WHO DIED OF BOREDOM

A genuinely funny (how many really are?) and adroit send-up of the spy genre which begins when one Arkady Nikitin who has been secretly reading Ian Fleming is recruited by the KGB to defeat their old competition -- no not M.5 -- but the GRU. He is given the moniker of an already executed traitor, Boris Gurbanov, as well as the code name Lolita and then sent to London where there are all kinds of Lolita-ish disasters -- the former ""bull of Moscow"" is only a ""harmless little Russian"" with worse to follow: the formula he's to secure (one of those all purpose food pills) is sent in error to his more GRUsome competitors and it's taps at twilight -- in Lenin's tomb. . . . Full of word play if your Berlitz is up to it and occasional nice touches -- a miserable Kim Philby reading The Times and feeding the ducks who stay submerged. A cheeky farce, and for all of that, intelligent too.