What’s So Great About ‘Slow Horses’? This Scene Says It All.

The British spy show owes its sarcasm and wit to Mick Herron’s novels. Our critic A.O. Scott breaks down a few sentences from Herron’s latest, “Clown Town.”

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By A.O. Scott

Oct. 16, 2025

A couple dozen pages into “Clown Town,” Mick Herron’s latest novel, two veteran spies share a bench in London. They’re Jackson Lamb and Diana Taverner, notorious fictional fixtures of MI5, the British intelligence service. Fans of “Slow Horses,” the Apple TV series adapted from Herron’s earlier Slough House books, will recognize the pair as the characters played with brisk professionalism and callused gravitas by Kristin Scott Thomas and Gary Oldman.

Those incomparable actors are a big part of the show’s appeal, but the Britain they inhabit — weary, cynical, clinging to the tattered scraps of ancient imperial glory — is built out of Herron’s witty, corkscrew sentences.