 | |
| Author | Andrew Lownie |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Hodder & Stoughton |
Publication date | 2015 |
| ISBN | 1473627362 |
Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess is a biography of the Soviet spy Guy Burgess by historian Andrew Lownie.
The biography began as a dissertation submitted by Lownie for his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh. [1]
This biography is considered to be the first of Burgess that understood the role that he played as one of the Cambridge Five. Stalin's Englishman received positive reviews in The Times, The Daily Telegraph , and The Guardian . "Burgess", wrote Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian, "charming and often drunk, was a much more dangerous and effective spy than has been assumed." [2]
The Times review commented: "He was also the most ruthless of the Soviet spies active in England before 1951, and every bit as destructive as Kim Philby." [3] The Times described it as "one of the great biographies of 2015." [4]
Lownie's work demonstrated that, far from being the least important of the Cambridge Five, Burgess was perhaps the most interesting, most complicated, and most influential of the five. [5]
Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally, many of whom have never spoken about him before, and the discovery of hitherto secret files, Stalin's Englishman brilliantly unravels the many lives of Guy Burgess in all their intriguing, chilling, colourful, tragi-comic wonder." The Daily Telegraph [6]
Writing in the English Historical Review in October 2017, Matthew Hughes described Lownie's biography as a "labour-of-love [...], a cracking read, rich with archival detail and interviews with those who knew Burgess. Lownie throws up three central questions: why did Burgess spy for the USSR, why did the British establishment not see him for what he was and how much damage did he do?" [7]
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a British intelligence officer and a spy for the Soviet Union. In 1963, he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring which had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been the most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.
The Cambridge Five was a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the Soviet Union during the Second World War and the Cold War and was active from the 1930s until at least the early 1950s. None of the known members were ever prosecuted for spying. The number and membership of the ring emerged slowly, from the 1950s onwards.
John Cairncross was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.
Anthony Frederick Blunt, styled Sir Anthony Blunt from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy.
Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild was a British scientist, intelligence officer during World War II, and later a senior executive with Royal Dutch Shell and N M Rothschild & Sons, and an advisor to the Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher governments of the UK. He was a member of the prominent Rothschild family.
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was a British diplomat and Soviet double agent, and a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era. His defection in 1951 to the Soviet Union, with his fellow spy Donald Maclean, led to a serious breach in Anglo-United States intelligence co-operation, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.
The Cambridge Apostles was an intellectual society at the University of Cambridge founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who became the first Bishop of Gibraltar.
Walter Germanovich Krivitsky was a Soviet intelligence officer who revealed plans of signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact after he defected to the West.
An Englishman Abroad is a 1983 BBC television drama film based on the true story of a chance meeting of actress Coral Browne with Guy Burgess, a member of the Cambridge spy ring who spied for the Soviet Union while an officer at MI6. The production was written by Alan Bennett and directed by John Schlesinger. Browne stars as herself.
Operation Unthinkable was the name given to two related possible future war plans developed by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee against the USSR during 1945. The plans were never implemented. The creation of the plans was ordered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in May 1945 and developed by the British Armed Forces' Joint Planning Staff in May 1945 at the end of World War II in Europe.
Cambridge Spies is a four-part British drama miniseries written by Peter Moffat and directed by Tim Fywell, that was first broadcast on BBC Two in May 2003 and is based on the true story of four brilliant young men at the University of Cambridge who are recruited to spy for the Soviet Union in 1934.
Morgan Goronwy Rees was a Welsh journalist, academic and writer.
A Question of Attribution is a 1988 one-act stage play, written by Alan Bennett. It focuses on the British art expert and former Soviet agent, Sir Anthony Blunt. It was premiered at the National Theatre, London, on 1 December 1988, directed by Simon Callow. The stage version of An Englishman Abroad, about Blunt's fellow agent Guy Burgess, was also performed on the same bill. The two plays are collectively called Single Spies.
Norman John Klugmann, generally known as James Klugmann, was a leading British Communist writer and WW2 Soviet Spy, who became the official historian of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Alice Friedmann, known as Litzi Friedmann, was an Austrian Communist who was the first wife of Kim Philby, a member of the Cambridge Five. Records identify her as the Soviet agent with the code name Mary.
Single Spies is a 1988 double bill written by the English playwright Alan Bennett. It consists of An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution, the former an adaptation of a television play the author had written for the BBC in 1983. Both plays depict members of the Cambridge spy ring and touch on their moral, political and aesthetic beliefs: the first shows Guy Burgess in exile in Moscow in 1958, seven years after absconding from Britain. The second focuses on Sir Anthony Blunt while he still holds high office in the Royal Household although known to the security services as a former Soviet agent. The title comes from a speech in Hamlet: ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’
John Evans Hunter was an American-born, BAFTA-nominated screenwriter in the British film industry. The son of actress Millicent Evans and producer/director Ernest J. Carpenter, Hunter was born in New York on 23 August 1911. He later claimed to be the illegitimate son of Douglas Fairbanks. His parents divorced in 1917 and his mother married director T. Hayes Hunter in Los Angeles in 1919. He graduated from Hollywood High School in 1927 and the family moved to England, where Hunter attended Trinity College, Cambridge. At Trinity, he was a member of the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club and an editor of the college paper.
Owen Matthews is a British writer, historian and journalist. His first book, Stalin's Children, was shortlisted for the 2008 Guardian First Book Award, the Orwell Prize for political writing, and France's Prix Médicis Etranger. His books have been translated into 28 languages. He is a former Moscow and Istanbul Bureau Chief for Newsweek.
F. A. Simpson was an Anglican priest, historian and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Andrew James Hamilton Lownie FRHistS is a British biographer and literary agent.
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