Overview
Goronwy Rees (1909-1979) was one of the most gifted and promising figures in the constellation of British poets, journalists, and intellectuals of the 1930s that included Louis MacNeice, W. H., Auden, C. Day Lewis, Isaiah Berlin, and Anthony Blunt. Like many liberals of his generation, he was shocked by the effects of the Depression and correspondingly sympathetic to the Communist regime in Russia. Guy Burgess, of the Cambridge spies--Burgess, Maclean, Philby, and Blunt, admitted his espionage to Rees. His association with Burgess was to blight the rest of Rees's life. When Burgess defected in 1951, and Rees denounced him to MI5, Rees was viewed more as a spy out to save his own skin than as an honorable citizen. His anonymous, sensationalist articles in The People, denouncing Burgess's political activities and all but naming names, condemned him with the British intellectual community--not for his politics but for his betrayal of a friend. Colleagues and acquaintances accused him of trying to initiate a McCarthyite witch-hunt. He lost his job. His academic career was ruined. In Looking for Mr. Nobody, Jenny Rees deals with many of the old charges made against her father in her search for the answer to her own question, ""Was he, too, a spy?"" Had he joined up with Burgess and Blunt and passed secrets to the Soviet Union? Her quest for the truth reveals a fascinating portrait of a brilliant but flawed man of letters, handsome and seductively charming, caught up in the radical, political commitments of the 1930s, Communist Party membership, and his tortured relationship with the notorious Cambridge spies.
Full Product Details
Author: Jenny Rees ,
Diana Trilling
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc
Imprint: Transaction Publishers
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.589kg
ISBN: 9780765806888
ISBN 10: 0765806886
Pages: 295
Publication Date: 30 October 2000
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Temporarily unavailable
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.
Reviews
[A] book which deserves nothing but praise. --John Gross, Sunday Telegraph This is a touching, unsentimental book worth reading. --Noel Annan, Spectator [W]ell written and thoughtful. . . . Reading her account we can at least scan the cultural and social and psychological (to say nothing of ideological) stresses that influenced one bright, active personality in the epoch of war and dictatorship. --Christopher Hitchens, London Review of Books
[A] book which deserves nothing but praise. </p> --John Gross, <em> Sunday Telegraph</em></p> This is a touching, unsentimental book worth reading. </p> --Noel Annan, <em> Spectator</em></p> [W]ell written and thoughtful. . . . Reading her account we can at least scan the cultural and social and psychological (to say nothing of ideological) stresses that influenced one bright, active personality in the epoch of war and dictatorship. </p> --Christopher Hitchens, <em>London</em><em> Review of Books</em></p>
Author Information
Jenny Rees, Goronwy Rees's eldest child, has been a newspaper journalist for most of her working life. She has been a reporter and feature writer for the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Daily Telegraph.
