Andrew Lownie

Guy Burgess was the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.


In… Show more

Guy Burgess was the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.


In this first full biography, Andrew Lownie shows us how even Burgess's chaotic personal life of drunken philandering did nothing to stop his penetration and betrayal of the British Intelligence Service. Even when he was under suspicion, the fabled charm which had enabled many close personal relationships with influential Establishment figures (including Winston Churchill) prevented his exposure as a spy for many years.

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. Show less

Few cities can boast such a distinguished literary pedigree as Edinburgh. Burns, Scott, Conan Doyle, Buchan, Dorothy Dunnett and J.K. Rowling have all lived in the city; Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon convalesced there (inspiring Pat Barker's Booker-prize-winning Regeneration trilogy), and Dickens and Thackeray came on triumphant reading tours. Visitors have ranged from Defoe and George Eliot to Wordsworth, Hans Christian Anderson and the hundreds of renowned authors who now appear at one… Show more

Few cities can boast such a distinguished literary pedigree as Edinburgh. Burns, Scott, Conan Doyle, Buchan, Dorothy Dunnett and J.K. Rowling have all lived in the city; Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon convalesced there (inspiring Pat Barker's Booker-prize-winning Regeneration trilogy), and Dickens and Thackeray came on triumphant reading tours. Visitors have ranged from Defoe and George Eliot to Wordsworth, Hans Christian Anderson and the hundreds of renowned authors who now appear at one of the literary world's most important annual events - The Edinburgh International Book Festival.This new and hugely expanded edition of The Literary Companion to Edinburgh traces the city's history from the Old Town, dominated by the Castle and the High Streets with its numerous wynds and closes, to the elegant and spacious New Town and its surrounding villages. Show less

Biography of the author and Governor-General of Canada.