When Sheila Fitzpatrick arrived in Oxford in 1964, with a couple of years of Russian language studies at Melbourne University and a Commonwealth Scholarship under her belt, she had more than a passing knowledge of Cold War spying. Her father, Brian Fitzpatrick, was a labour historian and well-known leftist who had advised the Labor Opposition leader H.V. Evatt when fallout from the Petrov affair implicated one of his staffers in contact with the enemy. She would experience the hostility, less dramatically, from the other side. Those experiences provide the leitmotif for her new book, A Spy in the Archives, a memoir of her formative experiences as a graduate student in Moscow.