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Stalins Englishman Paperback

4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 747 ratings
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  1. Language
    English
  2. Publisher
    HODDER & STOUGHTON
  3. Dimensions
    5.12 x 1.18 x 7.8 inches
  4. ISBN-10
    1473627389
  5. ISBN-13
    978-1473627383
  6. See all details
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Product details

  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1473627389
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1473627383
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.12 x 1.18 x 7.8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 747 ratings

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Andrew Lownie

Andrew Lownie

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Andrew Lownie was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was Dunster History Prizeman and President of the Union, before taking his Masters and doctorate at Edinburgh University. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he later returned to Cambridge as a visiting fellow at Churchill College.

He has been a bookseller, publisher, journalist , writing for the Times, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal , Spectator and Guardian, and since 1988 has run his own literary agency specialising in history and biography.

He is President of the Biographers Club, sits on the board of Biographers International Organisation and is a Trustee of the Campaign for Freedom of Information.

Born in Kenya and brought up in Bermuda, he now lives in London near Westminster Abbey. He has a particular interest in spies, Scotland and revisionist biography.

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4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
747 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

ConclusionsDrawn
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastically Detailed Biography That's Also A Quick Read
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2016
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A fantastically detailed (and lengthy) biography of 330 pages, that's also a very quick, absorbing read.

I first heard the name "Guy Burgess" when I read a biography of Kim Philby twenty years ago. That book ignited a lifelong interest in the history of cold war espionage. I've since read countless books on the subject, including a dozen about Philby himself, and another dozen about the other Cambridge Spies in his orbit, including Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Cairncross, Rees, and Straight.

About 15 years ago I first read somewhere that an exhaustive biography of Guy Burgess by Andrew Lownie would soon be published. I was very intrigued because Burgess was the most 'colorful' of those Cambridge Spies, but, other than a very short biography from the 1950s by 'fellow traveler' Tom Driberg, one about whom relatively little had seemingly been publicly disclosed. Buty that book was never published for whatever reason, until recently. Here it is, at long last.

This 330 page book fills that gap in 'the literature' phenomenally well. A lot of the detail was new to me. But as the extensive end notes make clear, what Lownie has also done exquisitely well is cull and collect the details about Burgess previously published over six decades in the myriad non-fiction books about the Cambridge Spies, and knit that all together, along with a lot of new information, into a compelling and revealing mosaic.

The result answers the two questions about Guy Burgess that had lingered unanswered in my mind for decades: (i) how did a man caricatured in 'the literature' as a dirty, louche, openly gay (at a time that was illegal in Britain) and communist, outspoken and acid-tongued, perpetually pickled drunk maneuver himself into successive positions of authority at the BBC, the British intelligence service(s), and the Foreign Office (especially a posting to buttoned up 1950s Washington, DC), and (ii) how damaging a spy was he really, or was he merely a flamboyant clown 'along for the ride,' tragically?

Along the way the book provides new detail after new detail as well. Some of that is mere trivia, but a lot of it contributes importantly to the full picture of the man that the books paints so effectively. If you want to read the names of the dozens of notable men with whom Burgess had 'affairs,' or even his preferred sexual positions, its all in here.
4 people found this helpful
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4.0 out of 5 stars Stalin's Englishman
Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2023
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An interesting account of a most unpleasant man, and a few years ago I read about Kim Philby, both are worth reading about.
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leonard bolton
3.0 out of 5 stars Lunatics Wanted -- Apply Within
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2021
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The now-hiring sign outside the foreign office read "lunatics wanted-apply within. And they did and were hired. The required qualification -- do you know someone in here?
Burgess was the most clueless amid a clueless group. Why did those Yanks ever share anything with them?
In Burgess's cases even the wrapping was bad -- dirty, unkempt, odorous, rude, debauched -- karma unfolded and he ended up alone in that dump Moscow.
Way to go Guy. Throwing away privilege, a university education, free money from a doting mother, excused by oblivious bosses -- for what -- a useless system that provided nothing he would want with only its symbolism keeping it alive as its supporters deserted it on realizing that it produced nothing -- but privation, imprisonment, misery and death -- even to its most faithful.
Oh well Guy -- you wasted your time, and your life as did the other Cambridge boneheads. If you listen carefully you can hear the gods laughing.
A pathetic story that could have been interesting but wasn't really.
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Lan the Answer Man
5.0 out of 5 stars Not Another "A Spy Among Friends," But Well Worth Your Time
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2016
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This is not last year's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre, but you probably knew that. Macintyre's book was a standout biography on the most famous of the Cambridge spies that won't soon be repeated.

Having said that, Andrew Lownie's new take on Guy Burgess, Stalin's Englishman, is as well researched as we can possibly expect, given how foggy the life of Burgess turns out to be. By all accounts Lownie spent many years searching the archives on Burgess, yet there are still large holes in what can be known about Burgess, the most interesting but perhaps the least important, in terms of how much he shared with his Russian masters, of the trio of Philby, Maclean and Burgess.

I do think that Guy Burgess was by far the most interesting of the three -- a man with a first-rate mind, a man of many talents (music, drawing, history, politics, the drawing room) and a flamboyant, seldom boring great and loyal friend to scores of the top people of his generation in England. He was also a drunk, a slob and notoriously wore his homosexuality on his sleeve.

A son of English privilege, he had everything -- money, school at Eton College and Cambridge. He held key positions at the BBC and the British Foreign Office, and he was at the center of information about the rise of Hitler, of World War II, early Chinese communist rule and the beginning of the Cold War. Yet in the end he failed at almost everything, including spying, and ended his days in exile in Moscow, where he remained faithful to communism but hated everything Russian.

Lownie captures much of this. I wish he had expanded his last main chapter, Summing Up, and had given us more of his expert overview of the arc of Burgess' finally very sad life.

With its limitations, this new look at the Cambridge spies is well worth your time.

I noted only after finishing this book that the author attended school in Asheville, NC, my home town, before going to Cambridge.
29 people found this helpful
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Christian Schlect
4.0 out of 5 stars The Red Apostle
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2016
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Those with a bent towards reading about espionage, and specifically the doings of the Cambridge Spy Ring, will enjoy this very readable book by Andrew Lownie. Mr Lownie appears to have devoted much time in tracking down all known sources to help explain the muddled life and unconventional career of that old Etonian, Guy Burgess.

Stripped away from the over-the-top sexual, smoking, and alcoholic excesses, this traitor's life had little left--even before those last empty years spent in the USSR. A burned-out hulk of a once promising life.

Looking back, what is astonishing is that Burgess lasted as long as he did while in purported loyal service to His Majesty's government.
3 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Avril Peppard
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent condition. Speedy delivery.
Reviewed in Canada on October 18, 2023
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It’s a book, and I’ve started reading it already. Quite excellent biography.
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100% tevreden. Koop met zekerheid.
5.0 out of 5 stars High quality
Reviewed in Belgium on January 21, 2024
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The item arrived quite quickly and in a really good condition. Very satisfying all round.
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Cornwallgurl
5.0 out of 5 stars A strong contender for most unlikeable Cambridge spy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 24, 2020
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Having just read Mr Lownie’s admirable biography of the Mountbattens, and Ben Mackintosh’s life of the noxious Philby, I was spurred on to read this. It was exhaustively researched, and I found it easy to read, being familiar with the long catalogue of the great and the good of the interwar years that formed Burgess’s extended acquaintance. I did spend quite a lot of it however puzzling to myself as to the “WHY?” Some reviewers have complained that Lownie does not address this, but I think it is hard to determine the depth and breadth of the conceit of a man who on the one hand embraced and wished to be seen as part of the Establishment, and on the other hand despised it so much that he felt duty bound to betray it as thoroughly and comprehensively as possible.

I was not aware that Burgess was the son of a Naval Officer – not a particularly brilliant one, it transpired. Or that he had had a brief period at Dartmouth himself. As was the approved path for Naval Officers of the day, Papa Burgess married a wealthy wife. Guy Burgess would appear to have been the wealthiest of the Cambridge spy ring, drawing on his trust funded private income throughout his life, including making complex arrangements to be able to access it even after his flight to the Soviet Union. His relationship with his mother was frankly creepy and unhealthy. He had a brother, who did not seem to share in the golden glow of his mother’s affection, which was heavily tilted towards Guy. His father’s early and sudden death and the lurid circumstances of Burgess’s discovery of it (whether true or not) seemed to have been traumatic, and his mother’s remarriage to a perfectly harmless upper middle-class Army Officer appeared to cause lasting resentment. Burgess’s father never rose beyond middling rank in the Navy, and at Eton, although undoubtedly brilliant, Burgess was not among the gilded youth. This too seems to have bred resentment.

His discovery of Communism whilst at Cambridge, along with other well-documented adherents, was a turning point in his life. It seems extraordinary that he could consort with the rich and titled, wear his Old Etonian tie, and manoeuvre his way into the BBC and various Government services with the sole aim of extracting information with which to comprehensively betray them and his country. It does not seem any more explicable now than to his contemporaries, although Communism in Cambridge in the 1930’s was more than a tad fashionable – verging on the compulsory if you wished to be taken seriously, it seems. He clearly had a personal friendship with Philby, possibly the most inscrutable of the three. Excessive drinking was a trademark of all of them, but Burgess & Maclean were known by their Soviet handlers to be indiscreet when inebriated. In hindsight, the heavy clues and not very subtle declarations of left wing ideology that Burgess scattered around, makes it very hard to understand why the allegiance to the Soviet Union of these three clever, upper middle class, educated men, all with very different chips on their shoulders, was not uncovered at the time. The reason of course being that they “were one of us”. And/or that there were people at the top of the various organisations for which they worked who connived to cover up for them and are as yet undiscovered fellow sympathisers – hinted at but not proved by Mr Lownie.

Burgess’s wit, charm, facility with cartoons, along with his appalling drunkenness, promiscuous homosexuality, dirtiness and general unsavouriness, were well portrayed, though widely known and recorded. This book made me wonder whether it was in fact a convenient bluff/cover. In the last section the author tries to get behind what motivated him – as with all the Cambridge spies he seemed unable to recant even when the appalling genocides of Stalin became known. Whether through utter conviction, indifference or a refusal to step back from a proclaimed viewpoint, we will never know. I was interested in the point made that Burgess, Maclean and Philby all had very close relationships with their mothers, and had largely absent fathers. But this does not turn people into traitors as a general rule.

The sad postscript of Burgess’s life, living in Moscow (which he clearly hated) and where he failed to learn the language or lead the gilded life he’d always enjoyed, whilst avidly consuming the Fortnums’ hampers sent periodically to him by his still doting mother and wearing his old Etonian bow ties, was particularly telling. Fresh supplies of the OE ties were requested by any visitors to be purchased and sent on to him. As if the Soviets were going to give him a better table as a result! But sympathy for this self-imposed misery? Not in my book. But even if it did not completely unravel the mystery as to what propelled him to treachery, or answer the question “who was the most dangerous/despicable of the Cambridge spies?” it was an excellent read.
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C. Hale
5.0 out of 5 stars Complex and gripping
Reviewed in Germany on September 17, 2015
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Andrew Lownie's biography of Guy Burgess is that rare achievement - a historical biography of considerable political and human complexity that is also a page turner. While the character of Burgess is a gift to a writer, flamboyant, self destructive, promiscuous, risk taking - Lownie weaves his remarkable story through an expertly painted historical narrative. And yet the book, decades in the writing apparently, has a fleetness of touch that compels attention.
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K
2.0 out of 5 stars Hard to read.
Reviewed in Canada on June 5, 2022
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This book is very detailed and not an easy read
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