Overview

This volume is aimed at anyone with an interest in the secret underworld of political and military intrigue. What is it like to be a spy? What makes someone decide to lead a secret life? What qualities do such people have in common? How do they get away without being detected? How do they slip up? How are they found out? What makes their life so extraordinary? What makes their life so ordinary? Why did ""Kim"" Philby become a spy? What events first sparked Sir Colin McVean Gubbins's interest in irregular warfare? What part did businessman Greville Wynne play in the Cuban missile crisis? And who, exactly, was Guy Fawkes? This text answers these, and other, questions.

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9780198606376

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Reviews

Spying, thanks largely to the fiction of Fleming, le Carre and Deighton and the films of their work, has established itself in the collective imagination as a shadowy, dangerous and yet glamorous existence. But, as this selection from the Dictionary of National Biography by former wartime intelligence officer M R D Foot shows, espionage is conspicuously lacking in glamour, for all the derring-do of the lives on presentation here. Part of the problem is that all the portraits are written strictly in accordance with original DNB policy as laid out by its original editor Leslie Stephen. He emphasized the need to express 'the greatest possible amount of information in a thoroughly business-like form', desiring an abundance of precisely given facts and figures over style. Admirable in many ways as this kind of approach is, providing a lucid and accurate presentation of the facts, it does make for occasionally dry reading. Another difficulty is that, as Foot admits in his introduction, one of the rules of the secret world is '...that anything really secret should not be written down at all'. And in some cases spying is really only an incidental part of a so-called spy's life. The long entry on the writer Somerset Maugham, for example, deals with his time as an Intelligence Officer in one brief paragraph; Anthony Blunt, a spy along with his Cambridge 'Apostles' Burgess, MacLean and Philby, was more enduringly an art historian. Good on facts, then, although with little scope for any real lifting of lids, this is still an authoritative work of reference which rounds up the usual suspects - Babington, Fawkes, Catesby, Cavell, T E Lawrence among them - as well as a number of more obscure names (Dudley Bradstreet, anyone?). Its 20th-century subjects benefit particularly from the often close, personal knowledge that each of the contributors had of them. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

M. R. D. Foot, CBE, is an historian and former wartime intelligence officer. He was Professor of Modern History at Manchester University (1967-73) and has been involved with a number of works, including writing many books on the SOE and editing the first four volumes of the Gladstone Diaries. He was also Consultant Editor of The Oxford Companion to World War II (1995, paperback edition 2001).

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