''Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess'' is a biography of the Soviet spy
Guy Burgess
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess (16 April 1911 – 30 August 1963) was a British diplomat and Soviet 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 ...
by historian
Andrew Lownie
Andrew James Hamilton Lownie (born November 1961) is a British biographer and literary agent.
Biography
He was educated at Westminster School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was President of the Cambridge Union in Easter term 1984. He has ...
.
The biography began as a dissertation submitted by Lownie for his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh.
Reception
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
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally.
It was fo ...
'', and ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
''. "Burgess", wrote
Richard Norton-Taylor in ''The Guardian'', "charming and often drunk, was a much more dangerous and effective spy than has been assumed."
''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
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 191211 May 1988) was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. In 1963 he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring which had divulged British secr ...
." ''The Times'' described it as "one of the great biographies of 2015."
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.
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''
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?"
Literary prizes
* Guardian Book of the Year
* The Times Best Biography of the Year
* Mail on Sunday Biography of the Year
* Daily Mail Biography of Year
* Spectator Book of the Year
* BBC History Book of the Year
References
{{Authority control
History books about the Soviet Union
Biographical books