Émile Zola

Émile Zola was a French novelist and leading figure of literary naturalism. His Rougon-Macquart sequence examines family, class, labour, politics and urban life under the Second Empire, while his intervention in the Dreyfus affair made him a major public intellectual.

Robert Harris’s An Officer and a Spy places Émile Zola within a narrative shaped by crime, espionage and covert power, military command and battlefield decision-making, and religion, belief and institutional authority.