Stalin's Englishman The Lives of Guy Burgess

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Why did Guy Burgess, 1st class Cambridge scholar and apparently one of the most British of characters, agree to work for a foreign power, of which he knew very little, as a student and continue to serve them as one of the Cambridge Spies for some thirty years before disappearing permanently to the Soviet Union as the net closed in?

So accessible and at times reading like a who's who from 1920 to 1950, Andew Lownie’s biography of Guy Burgess draws on incredibly extensive interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally and the discovery of hitherto secret files, to bring to life the many lives of one of Britain’s most notorious, fascinating, charming and and yet ruthless traitors.

Whether you detest the idea of someone so intelligent, gifted and privileged undermining his own country in the wholesale way he did, or not, the book deserves to be read so people can see beyond the vilified stereotype and understand the effect that social, political and intellectual upheaval can have on an impressionable young man, with no moral compass and a deep-seated desire to be someone and to shape events.

A message from the Author...

I’ve been fascinated by the Cambridge  Spy Ring since  Andrew Boyle’s The Climate of Treason  led to the exposure of Anthony Blunt in 1979. Why had these members of the Establishment betrayed everything to which they apparently subscribed?  What did they betray and how did they get away with it? The most enigmatic, complex and , I discovered,  the most important was Guy Burgess who  is a gift for a biographer. I hope I have conveyed the paradoxes of Stalin’s Englishman and you  enjoy the book as much as I’ve enjoyed researching and writing it.

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A Spy Among Friends: Philby and the Great Betrayal, Ben Macintyre
Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West, Edward Lucas

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