Andrew Lownie

This talk, which is based on a biography that won Guardian Book of the Year, The Times and The Mail’s Best Biography of the Year, tells the story of Guy Burgess.

He 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.

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.

Andrew Lownie was President of the Union at Cambridge and has an MSc in American Espionage. He has been a journalist, bookseller and publisher and has run his own literary agency since 1988. He was the London representative of the Washington-based National Intelligence Study Centre.