The second recent biography of the cold war spy adds much to a familiar epic thanks to newly released filesLike 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, and Stalin’s Englishman,but they carry out add materially to the familiar epic.
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, or rather than the notorious Philby,who was the real ringleader of the traitorous circle, and that Guy was a world-lesson networker.
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Source: theguardian.com