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Nice! I was wondering before whether Eliza, the 17th century spy girl from Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle", was inspired by historical examples. It seems that was the case.
> In this scintillating book, Nadine Akkerman demonstrates that women were unlikely to be suspected as intelligencers and, if unmasked, were usually treated more leniently than men.

This reminds me a passage from "Homage to Catalonia" from George Orwell:

"My wife was lying in bed all the while; obviously there might have been half a dozen sub-machine-guns under the mattress, not to mention a library of Trotskyist documents under the pillow. Yet the detectives made no move to touch the bed, never even looked underneath it. I cannot believe that this is a regular feature of the Ogpu routine. One must remember that the police were almost entirely under Communist control, and these men were probably Communist Party members themselves. But they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently dropped, making the whole search meaningless."

That book has an account going over the top in trench warfare and also describes bayoneting someone. It’s bad enough reading it, let alone being there. An independent account of what Blair was like post war would be interesting.
PTSD? Hard to tell; it would have been endemic at that time between and after the two great wars. You can detect traces of it in his later work; more directly, having encountered actual Stalinists in Catalonia he became a committed anti-Communist while remaining a socialist, an important political distinction which it is hard for some modern readers to understand.

Orwell would have seen trauma before Catalonia, during his time as a colonial policeman in Burma. "Shooting an Elephant" https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/elephant/english/e_el... gives a taste of that. (obvious content warning applies)

I love your paintings ;).
The Parliamentarians in the English Civil War had a pretty solid intelligence operation going. Far better than the Royalists could muster.
We took the word 'hidden' out of the title, since an unhidden network of spies would be oxymoronic.

Squeezing out title redundancies like that feels like refactoring code.

Edit: alright you guys, I defer to the panel of 4 and have hidden it again.

Hidden, from reading the review, here refers to the historical perspective: male spies were known and written about, but female spies have been kept hidden by historians not looking until this book.
Some spies are overt though, and they might form a network:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1982/11/03/sold...

> We took the word 'hidden' out of the title, since an unhidden network of spies would be oxymoronic.

Every embassy has spies who work out of it - that's an unhidden network.

The WW2 Pearl Harbor attack was coordinated by a spy working out of the Japanese embassy.

That's right big brother dang always knows best.