Andrew Boyle
Description
On May 25, 1951, at the height of the cold war, two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, disappeared from Great Britain just as they wer
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e about to be apprehended as spies for the Soviet Union. The defection of these members of the establishment stunned the nation. The notorious case was reopened by the serialization in The (London) Observer of Andrew Boyle's book, "The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied for Russia" which implied that "the fourth man," the Soviet agent who had tipped off Burgess and Maclean that British Intelligence was hot on their trail, was 72 year-old Sir Anthony Blunt, the highly respected art historian and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. A political storm swept Parliament when it learned that Sir Anthony had been granted immunity from prosecution when he secretly confessed to espionage in 1969, and that the Queen had long had in her employ a former spy (who was quickly stripped of his knighthood). Mr. Boyle seeks to explain how intelligent middle-class and upper middle-class students might have become Communists and traitors in the 30's: the postwar failure of nerve, the decline of empire, the disarray of the Labor Party, massive unemployment, boredom and so on. He absorbs with an account of upper-class flirtations with Fascism, with the memories of men and women who knew the three way back when, with digressions into the minds of ministers and poets.
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