Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring

Several years before World War II and into the mid-1950s, a cadre of young British men who studied at Cambridge University worked as spies for Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Author Lownie (John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier) spent more than two decades researching one of the most enigmatic members of the spy ring, Guy Burgess (1911–63). This unshaven, rumpled, slovenly man with a brilliant mind beguiled MI5, MI6, and the Foreign Office in Britain's intelligence apparatus during the critical war years, even leaking the atom bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. Lownie's intent is to chronicle the events that turned so many of the British elite into closet communists and particularly offer "a completely new picture of Guy Burgess…arguing he was the most important of the Cambridge spies." Many books have been written about the spies, often concentrating on Harold Philby. Burgess and another spy from the ring, Donald Maclean, defected to Russia in 1951 as they were about to be exposed.