About the book: 2017 / This book is about Guy Burgess, the unrecognized genius of espionage and the most eccentric agent of Soviet intelligence. In 1951, Burgess fled to the USSR and for twelve years faithfully served his adopted country, however, remaining an Englishman to the core, he was never able to adapt to life in Stalinist Russia. The activities of the true leader of the Cambridge Five still remain the subject of all kinds of fabrications and speculations; contemporaries and curators from the KGB give the most contradictory and ambiguous characteristics of his personality. Andrew Lowney managed to create a multifaceted portrait of an extraordinary, vicious intellectual, a representative of the generation of Western left-wing intelligentsia, which in the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century was captured by communist ideology.