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R. P. T. Davenport-Hines
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Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain Hardcover – October 23, 2018

4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 99 ratings
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What pushed Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby into Soviet hands?

With access to recently released papers and other neglected documents, this sharp analysis of the intelligence world examines how and why these men and others betrayed their country and what this cost Britain and its allies.

Enemies Within is a new history of the influence of Moscow on Britain told through the stories of those who chose to spy for the Soviet Union. It also challenges entrenched assumptions about abused trust, corruption and Establishment cover-ups that began with the Cambridge Five and the disappearance of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean on the night boat to Saint-Malo in 1951.

In a book that is as intellectually thrilling as it is entertaining and illuminating, Richard Davenport-Hines traces the bonds between individuals, networks and organisations over generations to offer a study of character, both individual and institutional. At its core lie the operative traits of boarding schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Intelligence Division, Foreign Office, MI5, MI6 and Moscow Centre.

Davenport-Hines tells many stories of espionage, counter-espionage and treachery. With its vast scope, ambition and scholarship, Enemies Within charts how the undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise and the suspicion of educational advantages began, and how these have transformed the social and political temper of modern Britain.

Previous page
  1. Print length
    672 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    William Collins
  4. Publication date
    October 23, 2018
  5. Dimensions
    6.25 x 1.75 x 9.44 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0008300836
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0008300838
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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‘Richard Davenport-Hines, in his fascinating and compendious new book … challenges prevailing interpretations and provides answers to all the major questions about spies… As a result, this book manages to be both nostalgic and politically progressive when it seeks to remind us, passionately and eloquently, of the value of trust’ Guardian

‘Davenport-Hines writes persuasively … Enemies Within provides a comprehensive demolition of many widely accepted myths surrounding communist subterfuge during the Cold War … it is encouraging to come across such an erudite and unapologetically ‘elitist’ counterblast’ Spectator

‘A supremely accomplished historian … he writes with mordant wit and a merciless eye for distortions … the great virtues of this book lie in the detail Davenport-Hines amasses and his sense of context’ Sunday Times

‘He is strong on retelling the spy stories … but the chief virtue of the book is the almost revisionist judgments he feels able to make based on his research … in this rich, detailed and entertainingly irascible book’ Book of the Week, The Times

‘The product of one of our greatest modern masters of non-fiction Richard Davenport-Hines, Enemies Within is an exhaustive … chronicle of spies in Britain … a mosaic of such vivid detail’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

‘There could not be a more experienced interrogator of a subject so festooned with myths of sleaze, power and treachery … Enemies Within is a peculiar and fascinating hybrid’ Observer

‘Richard Davenport-Hines dissects and destroys … conventional wisdom in his masterly retelling of Britain’s most notorious intelligence disaster … makes his case with splenetic zeal, backed by a formidable array of sources … fascinating’ Economist

‘The history of the five Cambridge spies recounted in this book with Richard Davenport-Hines’s usual vim and brio … a vivid panorama … [he] bases his case on wide research and illustrates it with a wealth of piquant anecdote’ Literary Review

About the Author

Richard Davenport-Hines won the Wolfson Prize for History for his first book, ‘Dudley Docker’. He is an adviser to the ‘Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’ and has also written biographies of W.H. Auden and Marcel Proust. His most recent book, ‘Titanic Lives’ was published in 2012. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature, he reviews for the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Collins (October 23, 2018)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 672 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008300836
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008300838
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.5 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.75 x 9.44 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 99 ratings

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R. P. T. Davenport-Hines

R. P. T. Davenport-Hines

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4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
99 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Robert P. Neuman is a retired college professor and management consultant
5.0 out of 5 stars From Cambridge to the Kremlin
Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2018
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Students of the efforts to undermine faith in America's electoral process and democratic institutions by Vladimir Putin and his pseudo-populist friends will find much to interest them in this impressive and provocative book. The author argues against the widespread belief that the so-called Cambridge spies (Burgess, Maclean, and Philby, et. al.) in the 'forties and 'fifties were upper class degenerates who operated and were protected within the shelter of an antiquated and hidebound Establishment. Instead, the author traces the treachery of these spies to the institutions within which they were raised and worked, schools and government agencies dominated, not by upper class bias, "but [by male] gender exclusivity that created the enabling conditions for espionage" in Britain's Foreign Office and intelligence services. The public exposure of these spies beginning in 1951 and the reaction of the British press to these traitors, Davenport-Hynes believes, launched a wave of anti-elite and anti-intellectual fervor that infects Britain to this day: "The wrecking of the Establishment [by the Cambridge spies] was a gift to the Kremlin." (457) Food for thought for American readers at a time when many of our major institutions and policies are being challenged at the highest levels of government. The book is incredibly well-researched and the author has an unfailing eye for the right anecdote and telling quote. However, he often becomes prolix and too detailed: do we really need to know that when the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs met his Soviet handler that she arrived at the rendezvous "on a bicycle with a wicker child's seat cushioned by a cheerful green pillow embellished with pictures of daisies?" (342) Finally, one error seems to have escaped the author's encyclopedic eye: Peter Rhodes, an American who became a communist at Oxford University in the late 'thirties, is mistakenly identified as a Rhodes scholar at Oriel College (212 & 262) when he appears to have held a less exalted graduate fellowship at that college.
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POL
4.0 out of 5 stars You Think Communism Casts a Long Shadow???
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2019
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I went into Davenport-Hines’ Enemies Within: Communists, Cambridge Spies, and the Making of Modern Britain with eyes open. I had gotten halfway through his Gothic: A History. I won’t go into that book’s issues, but I understood the possibility of like features. Mostly I was interested in the Cambridge Five. Specifically, Blunt and Philby. I imagined D-H’s mammoth work would provide more info than I probably wanted. This suspicion proved true, but somewhat disappointing.

Davenport-Hines has a rather large premise. He states with a truthfulness I daren’t dispute that the England’s security services were until very recently almost entirely staffed in positions of authority by men. These men got along with each other swell. They’d go off to the club, enjoy a few dozen snifters apiece, and mostly kept it quiet enough when a compatriot began aggressively quoting Marx or Lenin and attempted to uncouthly recruit them. I’m guessing usually when the tab became due. Because the office environment was composed almost entirely of males, a high premium was placed on the values of loyalty, discretion, and avoiding public embarrassment at all possible costs. This gender dominance according to D-H allowed those spying for Russia within the Foreign Office, MI5 & MI6 to escape detection and even allowed them to continue their seditious trade after they were detected. Whenever a spy was discovered and halted, though, the male patriarchy almost always attempted to avoid public scandal in the form of a trial. This blueprint of passive passivity worked sufficiently well until Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean decided to take an extended “holiday” to the Soviet Union. Had women been staffed in positions of prominence, almost certainly none of the recruitment, spying, and cover-ups would’ve proceeded as they had. Yes, I can say this is the first history book I’ve read where it felt the MeToo movement provided more than a little inspiration for its across the board revisionism.

The problem with baldly asserting what men are “like”, then claiming that were women to fill more of their roles things would be different—because ostensibly they’re “unlike” their male counterparts—leads to, well, touchy issues. One might neatly jump from men are loyal, discrete, and non-confrontational, then over to women are disloyal, indiscrete, and truculent. D-H clearly means that placing women in positions of influence and power from the 30s on would’ve changed the time-line as to how things ultimately unfolded; but this is a simple truism, not really an informative theory. The exclusion of women from almost all positions of power is a deep fault in itself. Attributing negative qualities to an entire gender often means attributing different negative qualities to the other as well. Another unfortunate feature of Enemies Within is D-H’s persistent debunking of past flabby explanations as to why some Brits spied for the communist cause. D-H writes repeatedly that upper classism had absolutely nothing to do with why the Martin Hari crowd decided to betray their country. To prove it D-H goes through each spy’s parents’ employment history. Actually, he extends this to non-spies as well. With the list of folk treated in the five hundred plus page work you’ll soon feel like your reading a nonstop flash mob resumé.

Now, sure, I could point out that the Cambridge Five all went to University and that alone confers an inherent degree of prestige whether the person in question went to Eaton or not and whether his dad cleaned toilets for a living. Sure, I could state in very bad faith that women actually outnumbered the men in the security services—albeit in mostly secretarial slots. Sure, I could point out that the Soviets had numerous female field officers and the “male” qualities of loyalty and discretion were as present in their actions on behalf of the Politburo as it could possibly wish. And, sure, I could gripe that the Big Five aren’t touched on significantly until almost two hundred pages in. But I can’t take away from D-H the incredible amount of information he provides to any reader of Enemies Within. Even if it in the end all buttresses an extremely faulty theory that isn’t really much of one to begin with.

BTW: Once you do get to it, however, the stuff on Burgess, Philby, and Blunt are well worth the price of admission.
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Top reviews from other countries

R H Daniell
5.0 out of 5 stars Spying - Historical Book
Reviewed in Germany on September 27, 2023
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Full of interesting facts about the secret services and the people involved.
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars As expected and on time
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 4, 2022
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Fabulous well researched book which is well written and covers a sensitive Historic topic that of Spying for the Soviet Union back then.
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Edward S
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, insightful, cynical
Reviewed in Germany on May 11, 2019
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Davenport-Hines has written a pager turner of a book, and with wit and irony. It's not just a story of the Cambridge Five but of the world of spying in the decades before. Enjoyed it thoroughly.
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Intermeddle
4.0 out of 5 stars Five turn traitor in Cambridge
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2018
Verified Purchase
The conceit of this intriguing book is that the significance of the Cambridge ring of spies (Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross) has been misunderstood and exaggerated because for fifty years they have been seen and assessed out of context. In fact, from the Russian revolution onwards until the fall of the Soviet union, a constant stream of communist sympathisers in both the UK and US collaborated with the Soviet secret services. In most cases they were not publicly known because they were 'turned' as double agents, fled or were expelled, without ever being publicly revealed or tried.
What distinguished the Cambridge five from the rest were their intellectual calibre, their recruitment by Soviet agents while at Cambridge, their connections to the UK secret services, and the extent and importance of their disclosures. The notion that they emanated from a corrupt aristocratic élite is fiction. Only Maclean had been born in a titled family. None of them was from a wealthy family. Only Burgess had been sent to Eton. Only Burgess and Blunt were homosexual. Their most obvious common features were alcoholism, and that they were detected.
Their treachery was facilitated, not by any old boy network or turning of blind eyes, but by a traditional government culture in which those who volunteered to work in government, often working hard and long for little pay, were assumed to act with loyalty and discretion. That assumption only seems naive in a cynical age. But Philby, Maclean and Blunt were all suspect for some time before their treachery was revealed. Any delay in that was not due to deliberate concealment or class-based omertà. It was due mainly to the ability of clever men to evade and dissemble, but also to the presumption of innocence, and reluctance to award the Soviets any propaganda victory. For fifty years, the public perception of the five has been the product of sensational popular journalism which, in the absence of much reliable fact, was based chiefly upon the prejudices of the journalists' employers.
To present his argument, Mr Davenport-Hines writes what is virtually a history of Anglo-Soviet mutual espionage from 1917 to 1989 (or rather, so much of it as is known about). His account is sometimes remorselessly detailed. This is an academic book rather than one for the casual reader. There is an occasional air of academic disdain. It fascinates none the less.
28 people found this helpful
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bernardrodgers
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 16, 2018
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Delivered quickly, just as described
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