Winston Churchill. During 1942, he was sent to Canada and the United States to lecture there on the British and the war. In Washington, he encountered President Franklin Roosevelt and lectured for senators and other major officials. He also was a guest in national and local radio broadcasts throughout the country. Returning to the United Kingdom during late 1942, he reversed his role and lectured throughout the country about America. Newman was also considered an authority on spies and wrote Epics of Espionage and the novel Spy. His 1945 collection of 31 short stories, Spy Catchers, was praised as one of the best books ever written concerning counterespionage. Newman's novel, The Flying Saucer, was the first book with the words flying saucer in the title. The theme of the book, to bring peace to the world, centred around an invasion of the UK, the USA and Russia by aliens. Boucher and McComas praised Flying Saucer as "good fun" but dismissed its politics as "hardly realistic". His science fiction novel The Blue Ants has been described by professor Paul Brian in his study Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction as an "absurd classic of Sinophobia" and "perhaps the earliest example of a fictional Russo-Chinese nuclear war" Newman was a chevalier in the Légion d'honneur. Allegations of espionage World War I Some of his early fiction novels, particularly Spy, were written in the first person with himself as the main character. That has led to allegations that he was a spy. Newman lied about his age to enlist at 17 and clarified in his 1960 autobiography, Speaking From Memory, that his war service was routine and unremarkable and that his novels were publicised in that way to achieve sales at the suggestion of his publisher, Gollancz. Correspondence between Newman and the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart held in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London, confirm Gollancz's marketing tactics by asking Newman to 'disappear' for two weeks during the book's initial presentation to the public. On its publication, Spy attracted considerable attention in the press. Newman had written the novel in such a way that it appeared to be autobiographical although there were several 'facts' that could easily be checked. Relishing the free publicity, (Spy ran to 18 editions) Newman eventually said in an interview: That statement was widely reported in the press worldwide, but even his