The Lives of Guy Burgess: An Evening with Andrew Lownie

Perhaps the most complex of the Cambridge Spies, Guy Burgess was an engaging and charming companion to many and an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others.  Recruited by the Soviets as a young man in the 1930s, he rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, to gain access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to the USSR. Join Andrew Lownie, the author of Stalin’s Englishman, formerly the London representative of the Washington-based National Intelligence Study Centre, as he discusses how even Burgess's chaotic personal life of drunken philandering did not stop him from espionage. Lownie interviewed more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally, many for the first time, and used hitherto secret files to reveal how even under suspicion, Burgess’s fabled charm—which had enabled many close personal relationships with influential figures including Churchill—prevented his exposure for many years.

Stalin’s Englishman, which in Great Britain was a 2015 Book or Biography of the Year in the Times, Guardian, Daily Mail, Spectatorand BBC History Magazine, will be available for sale and signing at the event.