Like London buses, you wait ages for a Guy Burgess biography, then two turn up at once. The journalist authors of this one are unlucky to be trailing in the recent wake of Andrew Lownie’s meticulously researched life of the disreputable but undeniably fascinating Guy, Stalin’s Englishman, but they do add materially to the familiar story.
With the benefit of hundreds of newly released National Archives files on Burgess and his fellow Cambridge spies, their breezy account confirms Lownie’s thesis that it was Burgess, rather than the notorious Philby, who was the real ringleader of the traitorous circle, and that Guy was a world-class networker.
Their revelations leave us all the more astonished that such a smelly, scruffy, lying, gabby, promiscuous, drunken slob could penetrate the heart of the establishment without anyone apparently noticing that he was also a Soviet masterspy.
Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone is published by Biteback (£20). Click here to buy it for £16
