Contemporary Authors

• North American Spies: New Revisionist Essays University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 1991
• The Edinburgh Literary Guide Canongate Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1992
• John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier Constable (London, England), 1995
• The Complete Short Stories ( by John Buchan) Thistle (London, England), 1996
• John Buchan's Collected Poems Scottish Cultural Press (Aberdeen, Scotland), 1996
• The Literary Companion to Edinburgh Methuen (London, England), 2000
• Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 2015

1. Stalin's Englishman : Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge spy ring LCCN 2016028503 Type of material Book Personal name Lownie, Andrew, author. Main title Stalin's Englishman : Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge spy ring / Andrew Lownie. Edition First U.S. edition. Published/Produced New York : St. Martin's Press, 2016. Description xiv, 433 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm ISBN 9781250100993 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER DA585.B78 L69 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Stalin's Englishman : the lives of Guy Burgess LCCN 2015463786 Type of material Book Personal name Lownie, Andrew, author. Main title Stalin's Englishman : the lives of Guy Burgess / Andrew Lownie. Published/Produced London : Hodder & Stoughton, 2015. Description xii, 427 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm ISBN 9781473627369 (hbk.) 1473627362 (hbk.) (ebook) CALL NUMBER UB271.R92 B87 2015 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. John Buchan : the Presbyterian cavalier : a biography LCCN 2003018205 Type of material Book Personal name Lownie, Andrew. Main title John Buchan : the Presbyterian cavalier : a biography / by Andrew Lownie. Edition Rev. ed., 1st U.S. ed. Published/Created Boston : David R. Godine, 2003. Description 364 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 1567922368 (pbk.) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip047/2003018205.html Shelf Location FLM2014 144392 CALL NUMBER PR6003.U13 Z594 2003 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 4. The literary companion to Edinburgh LCCN 2001339022 Type of material Book Personal name Lownie, Andrew. Main title The literary companion to Edinburgh / Andrew Lownie. Edition Rev. ed. Published/Created London : Methuen, 2000. Description viii, 200 p. : ill. ; 22 cm. ISBN 0413751309 Shelf Location FLS2014 108576 CALL NUMBER PR8692.E3 L69 2000 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 5. John Buchan's collected poems LCCN 96168555 Type of material Book Personal name Buchan, John, 1875-1940. Uniform title Poems Main title John Buchan's collected poems / edited by Andrew Lownie and William Milne. Published/Created Aberdeen : Scottish Cultural Press, 1996. Description xv, 232 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 1898218471 Shelf Location FLM2014 144384 CALL NUMBER PR6003.U13 A17 1996 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 6. The complete short stories LCCN 96212310 Type of material Book Personal name Buchan, John, 1875-1940. Uniform title Short stories Main title The complete short stories / John Buchan ; edited by Andrew Lownie ; foreword by William Buchan. Published/Created London : Thistle Pub., 1996-1997. Description 3 v. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0952675609 (v. 1) 095267565X (v. 2) 0952675617 (v. 3) CALL NUMBER PR6003.U13 A15 1996 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 7. John Buchan : the Presbyterian cavalier LCCN 95211019 Type of material Book Personal name Lownie, Andrew. Main title John Buchan : the Presbyterian cavalier / Andrew Lownie. Published/Created London : Constable, 1995. Description 320 p. ISBN 0094725004 : Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 8. The Edinburgh literary guide LCCN 93170610 Type of material Book Personal name Lownie, Andrew. Main title The Edinburgh literary guide / Andrew Lownie ; illustrated by Richard Demarco. Published/Created Edinburgh : Canongate Press, 1992. Description vii, 168 p. : ill., maps ; 22 cm. ISBN 0862413605 (pbk.) : Shelf Location FLS2014 108575 CALL NUMBER PR8692.E3 L69 1992 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 9. North American spies : new revisionist essays LCCN 91036303 Type of material Book Main title North American spies : new revisionist essays / edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Andrew Lownie. Published/Created Lawrence, Kan. : University Press of Kansas, c1991. Description ix, 256 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0700605258 (hardcover) : Shelf Location FLM2015 071471 CALL NUMBER E745 .N67 1991 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2)

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Lownie/e/B001HPC122/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

  Andrew Lownie
  Andrew Lownie
  Follow
  Andrew Lownie was born in Kenya, brought up in Bermuda and educated in Asheville, North Carolina before attending the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. A former journalist for The London Times and the British representative for the Washington-based National Intelligence Centre, he helped set up the Spy Museum in Washington. Now a successful literary agent and the President of The Biographers Club , his books include an acclaimed life of the writer and former Governor General of Canada John Buchan.

• Thistle Publishing - http://www.thistlepublishing.co.uk/page166.html

  Andrew Lownie

  Andrew Lownie was born in 1961 and was educated in Britain and America. He read history at Magdalene College, Cambridge where he was President of the Union. He went on to gain an MSc at Edinburgh University and spend a year at the College of Law in London.

  After a period as a bookseller and journalist, he began his publishing career as the graduate trainee at Hodder & Stoughton. In 1985 became an agent at John Farquharson, now part of Curtis Brown, and the following year became the then youngest director in British publishing when he was appointed a director.

  Since 1984 he has written and reviewed for a range of newspapers and magazines, including The Times, Spectator and Guardian, which has given him good journalistic contacts.

  As an author himself, most notably of a biography of John Buchan and a literary companion to Edinburgh, he has an understanding of the issues and problems affecting writers. He is a member of the Association of Authors' Agents and Society of Authors and was until recently the literary agent to the international writers' organisation PEN. In 1998 he founded The Biographers Club, a monthly dining society for biographers and those involved in promoting biography, and The Biographers' Club Prize which supports first-time biographers.

  BOOKS

  North American Spies
  Mail: info@thistlepublishing.co.uk

• Bookseller - http://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/andrew-lownie-310202

  QUOTED: "I was just going to Cambridge as Anthony Blunt and other spies were being revealed and it captured my imagination. Why should men at the centre of the British establishment, apparent patriots, seek to enjoy their position but also work against it? The story is as much about personal as public betrayal."
  "I think what will surprise people is how effective Burgess was as a spy – I argue he was the most important – and how well-regarded he was by a range of respected people from Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden to GM Trevelyan, Maynard Keynes and Ernest Bevin."
  "His visitors in Moscow alone included Michael Redgrave, Frederick Ashton, Graham Greene and Stephen Spender, Isherwood wrote a poem about him, George Orwell was a friend and colleague and his friends ranged from Laurence Olivier and Lucian Freud to EM Forster and Cyril Conolly. There is also his bisexuality and close friendship with a female member of a distinguished British political family."

  When the agent is the author: Andrew Lownie
  Published August 29, 2015 by Porter Anderson
  Share
  'A lot of new material'

  "Being an author myself again has made me a better agent I believe," Andrew Lownie tells me.

  Not nearly the sinister combo of student-and-spy, fortunately, the literary agent Lownie nevertheless is an accomplished chameleon whose colours can switch to those of an author as easily as putting on a red sportcoat.

  His new biography, releasing on 10th September, reopens some of our favorite Cold War tales, those of the Cambridge ring of Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross.

  Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess also is giving The Daily Mail a chance to write the word SUPERSPY in all-caps — remind me to write FUTUREBOOK that way more frequently, will you? — as it works its way through nearly a week of excerpts and essay material from Lownie about the work. Here's the first article, and Lownie tells me that successive installments run through Thursday (3rd September).

  Just look at that opening entry's monograph of a headline: "Sozzled seducer who was Stalin's SUPERSPY: Debauched and indiscreet, Old Etonian Guy Burgess was a very unlikely KGB spy. But as a major biography reveals, that's what made him deadly."

  The parts of the Burgess story that we get in such headlines, of course, are never the bits that Lownie gives us along the lines of how, after his 1951 defection to the Soviet Union, Burgess "lived out the rest of his life in a sad and pointless exile, yearning for home and England, the land he had betrayed."

  But what drives the new book is this context of improbability. As Lownie writes in his preface:

  Burgess is certainly the most complex and enigmatic of the Cambridge Spies, a man of enormous contradictions and complexities. Regarded as louche, unreliable and often unemployable, he neverthe­less managed to penetrate such bastions of the Establishment as the BBC, the Foreign Office and MI6, to earn the respect of Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden, and to use his position to pass on crucial secrets over a period of fifteen years. For every person who was repelled by his scruffiness and selfishness, there was another who was enchanted by his charm, intelligence and kindness.
  Additional installments in the Mail include material, Lownie says, on "how a well-known peer kept quiet a manslaughter charge for killing someone driving from Cambridge to London" and "the woman who loved both Philby and Burgess." Another headline greets Mail readers Monday: "The most promiscuous man who ever lived: New biography of Guy Burgess reveals Cambridge spy would sleep with anyone from 17 to 75 - but his real passion was for treachery."

  Here in our digital age, of course, when spies are as likely to operate on the ether as they are in bed or on the River Cam, there's a fine site for the new book.

  When not studying spy rings

  Lownie's agency, founded in 1988, has a stable of more than 200 authors. Lownie is the nonfiction side of the shop, as the Burgess book might suggest, while David Haviland is widening the agency's fiction territory.

  The agency has also set up Thistle Publishing. Lownie talks of the publishing wing's usefulness in trying out new material that traditional publishing houses may not be convinced is viable. If something can be published through an imprint like Thistle, then a track record can be attempted and publishers might be willing to have another look.

  In the run-up to the book's release, I asked Lownie to take on a few questions, not only because it's not every day that one of our leading agents comes out with a book of his or her own (surprising it doesn't happen more, really) but also because many may think the Burgess story is played out. Needless to say, the tale's combination of shame and glamour is hard for us to get enough of. I remember the engaging tension of the West End stage production of Alan Bennett's Single Spies — An Englishman Abroad is the act focused on Burgess and his encounter in Moscow with the actress Coral Browne.

  Lownie tells us that he has interviewed more than 100 people for his book. There has to be more than our abiding titillation behind his return to the old SUPERSPY, right? That's where we start with our Q&A.

  'Hitherto secret files'

  The FutureBook: So, Andrew, why now? I've seen references to "hitherto secret files." Are these something you now could work with because of a statute of limitations being up or is there some other story behind the release of new documents?

  Andrew Lownie: In the autumn the British National Archives will be releasing some 250 files on the Burgess and Maclean case, which the Foreign Office had retained "by mistake," covering their own response to the case including new security procedures. This is alongside an ongoing programme of releases from MI5 and various requests under Freedom of Information legislation which I’ve made over the last few years.

  For example, as of 21st August, MI5 was to have released, I understand, the membership records of the Cambridge University Socialist Society, a Communist cell, for the 1930s, which may reveal names of hitherto unknown establishment figures and which I’ve long requested.

  British government records are supposed to be deposited in public archives within 30 years, unless the Lord Chancellor agrees otherwise, but this has been flouted and it's something I’m campaigning on. The FBI are much better about releasing records and I’ve seen some new Burgess material, but they are constrained by what the British will allow. I’ve found a lot of new material in private papers including the revelation of a new atomic spy in correspondence between two senior Foreign Office security officials.

  The FutureBook: Do you have a personal connection with the story in some way? Are you a spy, Andrew?

  Andrew Lownie: If I said I was a spy you wouldn’t believe me and if I denied it you wouldn’t believe me either so I’ll be mysterious. A well-read friend in MI6 travels under cover of being a literary agent so I suppose the job might be good cover – or now not.

  I was just going to Cambridge as Anthony Blunt and other spies were being revealed and it captured my imagination. Why should men at the centre of the British establishment, apparent patriots, seek to enjoy their position but also work against it? The story is as much about personal as public betrayal.

  The FutureBook: I'm interested to see that your book is referred to as the first full biography of Burgess. I think many of us would have assumed that something existed, but we'd have been wrong, apparently?

  Andrew Lownie: Burgess cooperated with a biography written by Tom Driberg in 1956. It’s as interesting in what it doesn’t say as what it says and the fact that both Soviet and British intelligence tried to use it for its own purposes.

  Burgess pops up in all the Cambridge spy books but because he fled Britain in 1951 and died in 1963 [at age 52], few people are alive who knew him. He did keep correspondence – for blackmailing rather than sentimental reasons – but it was scooped up by MI5 in 1951.

  Blunt, Philby, Maclean have all had lives but they died more recently. A self-published biography of Burgess appeared a few years ago but the author refused to use any Russian sources as tainted – the Russians have selectively released some files in recent years – and didn’t interview anyone.

  I interviewed over a hundred people who had never spoken before and had access to the papers of Burgess’s two long-term boyfriends.

  The FutureBook: What part of the Burgess story is the most compelling to you?

  Andrew Lownie: I think what will surprise people is how effective Burgess was as a spy – I argue he was the most important – and how well-regarded he was by a range of respected people from Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden to GM Trevelyan, Maynard Keynes and Ernest Bevin.

  His visitors in Moscow alone included Michael Redgrave, Frederick Ashton, Graham Greene and Stephen Spender, Isherwood wrote a poem about him, George Orwell was a friend and colleague and his friends ranged from Laurence Olivier and Lucian Freud to EM Forster and Cyril Conolly. There is also his bisexuality and close friendship with a female member of a distinguished British political family.

  The FutureBook: You also told me that you'd been at work for some time on the book. What has the process been like?...Has this project served as a kind of sanity sideline for you or as another element of such a busy life and career?

  Andrew Lownie: It has been tough which is why it has taken so long. Agenting is already a seven-day-a-week job with some 20,000 submissions a year and personally handling over 200 authors. However, I found that by working late and taking the odd day off for research trips that it was manageable. The book wrote itself because Burgess is such a larger than life character and because I’d done so much research. It’s given me a new respect for authors.

  '15% ebook royalties, just to keep me on my toes'

  The FutureBook: As for the agent-as-author element of the story...how does a leading agent like you shop around your own book? Do you hand it to another agent to sell? Or did you in fact know of an interest at Hodder & Stoughton?

  Andrew Lownie: I’ve written books before – my literary guide to Edinburgh and various books on the writer John Buchan were published in the 1990s – but clearly much has changed.

  I did talk to an agent but decided that in this field I knew the right editors. I simply submitted as I would for any author and editors responded in the same way. Hodder could publish quickly, which was important to me, and I liked their editorial and publicity team which is experienced and very smart. The fact their offices were close and that I had started my publishing career there was a bonus. On my side, it’s been a very happy experience.

  The FutureBook: When the publisher sees an ace agent coming in the door on his own behalf, does the publisher pull out "the good contract"? Or did you find that you had to negotiate just as you would for a client of the agency?

  Andrew Lownie: I had to negotiate though they quoted previous deals back at me and they even slipped in a few fast ones like 15% ebook royalties just to keep me on my toes.

  The FutureBook: And did you come out of the experience with any new insights into things, having been "the talent" this time? ...Were there any moments when you thought, "Hm, that's the problem my authors have been telling me about" or "Boy, this isn't nearly as bad as our authors make it sound"?

  Andrew Lownie: My authors have always had happy experiences at Hodder, another factor in going with them, so I didn’t expect problems. In fact, it’s given me a new respect for the care editors take with manuscripts – we had three sets of proofs – and the imagination and contacts of their publicists. There is a lot agents don’t see and being an author myself again has made me a better agent I believe.

  The FutureBook: How about the US publication?

  Andrew Lownie: St Martin’s have bought US and Canada rights but frustratingly can’t publish until Fall 2016. Hodder bought, edited and published the book within three months without cutting any corners – it even had a legal read though almost everyone in it is dead. It shows it can be done.

  The FutureBook: Very good timing in the UK, too, the 10th of September, high season. Will the release of the book add greatly to your workload, or do you expect rolling out the book to be fairly manageable?

  Andrew Lownie: I’m due to give some 30 talks over next three months from Gibraltar to Dorset and Scotland to Suffolk and have written lots of articles on Burgess and his circle or comment pieces on Freedom of Information legislation. So it will be busy.

• Andrew Lownie Literary Agency - http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/about_agency

  About the Agency

  The Andrew Lownie Literary Agency Ltd, founded in 1988, is now one of the UK's leading boutique literary agencies with some two hundred non-fiction and fiction authors and is actively building its fiction list through new agent David Haviland . It prides itself on its personal attention to its clients and specialises both in launching new writers and taking established writers to a new level of recognition.

  Books represented have included: The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English: The Oxford Classical Dictionary; The Penguin Companion to the Edinburgh Union; Norma Major's history of Chequers; the memoirs of Sir John Mills, Alan Whicker, Gloria Hunniford, David Hasselhoff, Emily Lloyd, Kerry Katona and Patrick MacNee ; the best-selling fostering series by Cathy Glass and Casey Watson; Sam Faiers’ Living Life the Essex Way; Daniel Tammet’s international best-seller Born on a Blue Day; Laurence Gardner’s The Magdalene Legacy and The Shadow of Solomon, the literary estates of Joyce Cary and Julian MacLaren-Ross; the historians Juliet Barker, Roger Crowley, Tom Devine, Robert Hutchinson, Sean McMeekin, Linda Porter, Geoff Roberts ,Desmond Seward, David Stafford and Christian Wolmar; the wine writer Michael Schuster; crime writers, such as Mei Trow and David Roberts, and thriller writers such as Duncan Falconer.

  The agency sells directly to the US and Australia and uses sub-agents for translation and film rights including The Marsh Agency, Wolfsong Media and The Ki Agency. It also places its authors as speakers at festivals and on cruise ships.

  Andrew Lownie
  About Andrew

  Andrew Lownie was born in 1961 and was educated in Britain and America. He read history at Magdalene College, Cambridge where he was President of the Union. He went on to gain an MSc at Edinburgh University and spend a year at the College of Law in London. After a period as a bookseller and journalist, he began his publishing career as the graduate trainee at Hodder & Stoughton. In 1985 became an agent at John Farquharson, now part of Curtis Brown, and the following year became the then youngest director in British publishing when he was appointed a director. He set up the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency in 1988.

  Since 1984 he has written and reviewed for a range of newspapers and magazines, including The Times, Spectator and Guardian, which has given him good journalistic contacts. As an author himself, most notably of a biography of John Buchan and a literary companion to Edinburgh, he has an understanding of the issues and problems affecting writers. He was until recently the literary agent to the international writers' organisation PEN. In 1998 he founded The Biographers Club, a monthly dining society for biographers and those involved in promoting biography, and The Biographers' Club Prize which supports first-time biographers. He has a regular advice column in the writing magazine Words with Jam, writes an entry each year on submitting to agents for The Writers Handbook, contributed to The Arvon Book of Life Writing and regularly gives talks on aspects of publishing.

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-lownie-64868620/?ppe=1

  Andrew Lownie
  Owner, Andrew Lownie Literary Agency Ltd
  Andrew Lownie Literary Agency Ltd Cargilfield
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  Andrew Lownie Literary Agency Ltd
  Owner
  Company NameAndrew Lownie Literary Agency Ltd
  Dates EmployedOct 1988 – Present Employment Duration28 yrs 8 mos
  The Andrew Lownie Literary Agency Ltd, founded in 1988, is now one of the UK's leading boutique literary agencies with some two hundred non-fiction and fiction authors and is actively building its fiction list through new agent David Haviland . It prides itself on its personal attention to its clients and specialises both in launching new writers and taking established writers to a new level of recognition.

  Books represented have included: The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English: The Oxford Classical Dictionary; The Penguin Companion to the Edinburgh Union; Norma Major's history of Chequers; the memoirs of Sir John Mills, Alan Whicker, Gloria Hunniford, David Hasselhoff, Emily Lloyd, Kerry Katona and Patrick MacNee ; the best-selling fostering series by Cathy Glass and Casey Watson; Sam Faiers’ Living Life the Essex Way; Daniel Tammet’s international best-seller Born on a Blue Day; Laurence Gardner’s The Magdalene Legacy and The Shadow of Solomon, the literary estates of Joyce Cary and Julian MacLaren-Ross; the historians Juliet Barker, Roger Crowley, Tom Devine, Robert Hutchinson, Sean McMeekin, Linda Porter, Geoff Roberts ,Desmond Seward, David Stafford and Christian Wolmar; the wine writer Michael Schuster; crime writers, such as Mei Trow and David Roberts, and thriller writers such as Duncan Falconer.
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  Company NameChurchill College, Cambridge
  Dates Employed2016 – 2016 Employment Durationless than a year
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  Company NameBIO
  Dates Employed2010 – 2013 Employment Duration3 yrs
  John Farquharson /Curtis Brown
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  Company NameJohn Farquharson /Curtis Brown
  Dates Employed1986 – 1988 Employment Duration2 yrs
  See description See more about Director, John Farquharson /Curtis Brown
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  Company NameHodder & Stoughton
  Dates EmployedSep 1984 – Mar 1985 Employment Duration7 mos
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  Featured Skills & Endorsements
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  Endorsed by Mark McGinlay and 35 others who are highly skilled at this

  Endorsed by 2 of Andrew’s colleagues at Hodder & Stoughton
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  Brian Lett QC
  Brian Lett QC
  Barrister and Author
  December 28, 2011, Andrew worked with Brian in the same group
  Andrew was kind enough to look at a manuscript of mine. I commend him for his courtesy, speed of response and good advice.
  Jing Dong
  Jing Dong
  Global Lead Cloud and Automation at Schroders
  July 30, 2010, Andrew was a client of Jing’s
  Andrew Lownie has always been one of my favorite client to work with. We have been worked together on his literary agency website for several years and have achieved a lot of improvements. He is always nice, kind and helpful. No doubt that he has such good reputation in the business.
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  Accomplishments
  Andrew has 3 publications3
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  Publications
  Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess The Edinburgh Literary Companion John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier

• Electric Scotland - http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/magazine/febmar2006/story24.htm

  QUOTED: "I suppose I’ve been researching it for over thirty years! I was at boarding school in Edinburgh in the 1970s from the age of 10 to 18 as my parents lived in Bermuda and I had family in Edinburgh. I grew to love the city and to spend much of my free time, whilst my contemporaries were at rugby matches or shopping, exploring the city."
  "It is a magical city because quite rough country such as Arthur’s Seat is literally at the foot of the High St and you never know what wonderful vista you will find as you turn a corner. I still haven’t walked every narrow alley in the Old Town. Much of this exploring was done on foot, but during my last year I secretly kept a bicycle which allowed me to explore further a field."
  "A few houses had plaques showing a famous person had lived there, but otherwise I would stumble across an association in the course of reading history books or novels and felt that association should be better known."
  "When I returned to Edinburgh after Cambridge as a post-graduate to study American Espionage (but that’s another story) I decided I would write a different kind of travel book about the city of my youth. One that was about the people who lived there, how the city had affected them and how the city had been described in fiction and non-fiction."

  A Chat with Andrew Lownie

  Author of
  The Edinburgh Literary Companion

  By Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Atlanta, GA, U.S.A.
  Email: jurascot@earthlink.net

  Q: This is a wonderful book. How long did it take from your initial research until publication? What other books have you written, if any? If you do not mind sharing with our readers, what do you have planned for the future regarding your next book?

  A: I suppose I’ve been researching it for over thirty years! I was at boarding school in Edinburgh in the 1970s from the age of 10 to 18 as my parents lived in Bermuda and I had family in Edinburgh. I grew to love the city and to spend much of my free time, whilst my contemporaries were at rugby matches or shopping, exploring the city. It is a magical city because quite rough country such as Arthur’s Seat is literally at the foot of the High St and you never know what wonderful vista you will find as you turn a corner. I still haven’t walked every narrow alley in the Old Town. Much of this exploring was done on foot, but during my last year I secretly kept a bicycle which allowed me to explore further a field. A few houses had plaques showing a famous person had lived there, but otherwise I would stumble across an association in the course of reading history books or novels and felt that association should be better known.

  When I returned to Edinburgh after Cambridge as a post-graduate to study American Espionage (but that’s another story) I decided I would write a different kind of travel book about the city of my youth. One that was about the people who lived there, how the city had affected them and how the city had been described in fiction and non-fiction. After several rejections by publishers who felt there was no market for the book, The Edinburgh Literary Guide was published in 1992 by a small Edinburgh publisher called Canongate, received some good reviews, sold its modest print run and went out of print.

  I forgot about it as I pursued a career as a journalist, set up as a literary agent and published other books on American spies and the writer John Buchan. In the late 1990s, I noticed a publisher had a series of literary companions to cities, such as Dublin, and asked if they would be interested in adding a book on Edinburgh to their series. They were and I quickly updated the book. Much had changed in literary Edinburgh in the intervening eight years, not least Ian Rankin and Edinburgh becoming the fictional crime capital of the world. The book was published in 2000 as The Literary Companion to Edinburgh and I was invited to talk about it at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

  This time, I saw it might have a longer term future as an alternative guide to Edinburgh and something residents, visitors and expatriates might equally enjoy. I sold the book on a limited licence and was therefore free to again update the book following the city’s successful bid to become the first UNESCO City of Literature in 2004. For the third edition, published in July 2005 and now called The Edinburgh Literary Companion, some three hundred novels set in the city were added to the existing list of two hundred and fifty, the Richard Demarco line drawings dropped in favour of moody photographs and maps redrawn. Six months after publication, I’ve already built up a large file of new material to be added so it shouldn’t be long before there is yet another edition if I can think of the right title.

  I’m now writing a life of the British spy Guy Burgess, another subject on which I’ve been collecting material for a very long time.

  Q: You mentioned in an email to me that your father has written a book on Edinburgh. Please give us a brief comparison of the two books as to emphasis and divergence?

  A: My father’s book Auld Reekie: An Edinburgh Anthology, his first at the age of eighty and with an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith, was published just before Christmas 2004 and has had extremely good reviews and sold well. Whereas my book is arranged as a series of walks and concentrates on Edinburgh’s literary associations, his book has a much wider appeal. It is a portrait of Edinburgh seen through the eyes of residents, visitors and well-known exiles such as RL Stevenson and Muriel Spark. Some extracts are a few lines, others several pages and he wittily juxtaposes his quotes to show how even the same experiences or events in Edinburgh can elicit very different reactions. The book moves from ‘First Impressions’ to quotes on well-known ‘Places’, ‘People’, ‘Visitors’ and, to my mind, the most original and memorable section ‘Everyday Life’. His quotes give a picture of Edinburgh enjoying itself and in adversity and also looks at the various institutions which determine Edinburgh’s make-up - Parliament, the Church and various professions such as the Law and Medicine. He is now writing a book, though nearly blind, on the Scottish feudal barony.

  Q: What does working as a literary agent entail? I think our readers would enjoy hearing your answer.

  A: Every day as a literary agent is different. I represent over a hundred authors ranging from academics such as the new Professor of History at Edinburgh, Tom Devine, who has written the acclaimed The Scottish Nation and The Scottish Empire, to historians, such as Michael Fry who has just published a revisionist book on the Highlands and delivered a book on the Union of 1707, to young journalists such as David Stenhouse whose book describing the Scottish takeover of England over the last three centuries has generated a lot of debate. And that’s just the Scottish authors. Add the memoirs of actors such as Sir John Mills, Patrick MacNee and David Hasselhoff, the Cambridge Guide to Literature in English and Oxford Classical Dictionary, Mind, Body & Spirit books and literary fiction and you have some idea of the variety. You can read about a ‘typical’ week on my website www.andrewlownie.co.uk.

  Q: Your book is chocked full of bits and pieces of information about those who have walked the streets of Edinburgh in days of yore. What process did you use to cultivate all this information on so many people?

  A: Reading, walking and checking. The information comes from a variety of sources - novels, histories, memoirs, newspaper accounts, interviews on websites - but it then has to be double-checked and then I walk the route repeatedly for every edition to make sure everything I describe is as it was. The Internet, Google Alert, Abebooks and emails from readers all play a crucial part.

  Q: One particular person you quote a good bit is Sir Walter Scott, a true Edinburgh resident. I have noticed distinguished authors like you, Magnus Magnusson and Arthur Herman have quoted Scott quite extensively in recent books. Have you noticed a “comeback” for Sir Walter in recent years as to his popularity?

  A: I don’t think Walter Scott, like my hero John Buchan, ever went out of fashion but it is true their books are now more widely available, readers are attracted by their sharply drawn characters, intricate plot lines and strong narrative pace, television and film have discovered the filmic qualities of their books and their important role championing and popularising Scottish history is increasingly being recognized.

  Q: Some of us in America are not as familiar with one of your “own particular loves,” namely Robert Garioch. Can you tell us more about him to whit our appetites enough to check him out on the Internet or in bookstores?

  A: I probably quote more Robert Garioch (1909-81) in the book than any other poet, simply because he writes so evocatively and powerfully about Edinburgh life and his poetry is so accessible, witty and memorable. He saw himself in the tradition of his predecessors Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson (is that why I called my son Robert?) and deserves to be as well known. His poetry is now widely available and I’d encourage you to read him and Norman MacCaig, Stewart Conn…

  Q: How difficult was your self-imposed goal of trying to appeal to local residents of Edinburgh and first time tourists? Do you feel you achieved your goal?

  A: I will leave the residents and tourists to judge but clearly the level of knowledge and interest does vary and one can’t please everyone. I’ve tried to include lots of quirky and less well-known information, have lots of anecdotes, keep the narrative moving along and let the quality of other people’s prose carry the book but to also offer through the footnotes the chance to find out more detailed information on particular subjects of interest.

  Q: You mention in the preface of your Edinburgh book that “…over 500 novels have taken the city as their backdrop - a hundred of them published in the last fifteen years…” Why, in your opinion, have there been so many people writing so many books about that city? Does the same hold true of Scotland’s other major city, Glasgow, or “the capital of the Highlands”, Inverness?

  A: I think Edinburgh is unique because it was both the capital and with its university a great European city; it was always seen, as now, as part of any tour of Great Britain and it was a place of literary pilgrimage, not least for European writers such as Hans Christian Andersen who came to pay homage to Walter Scott. It is a divided city with extremes of wealth and poverty, a paradoxical and subtle city which appeals to writers and a breathtakingly beautiful one. It is also a small and intimate city so more easily known than larger metropolises and its fortunes throughout history have of course been inextricably linked to the fate of Scotland.

  Q: My wife, Susan, and I were in London this past September (2005) and were guests of the London Burns Club for a rather remarkable luncheon at the Caledonian Club. Since you live in London with your family, are there other clubs or attractions for those of us who visit London where we may enjoy meeting with Scottish people?

  A: I think the best way to meet Scottish people in London is through the two Scottish churches - St Columba’s, which I attend, and Crown Court. Both are very friendly and a wonderful mix of regulars and visitors, young and old. Perhaps also clubs such as the Caledonian but you have to be a reciprocal member of another club or at a rugby match for London Scottish. David Stenhouse in his book on Scots in London, On the Make, shows how easily the Scots assimilate and that there are few Scottish ghettoes but does list a few places where Scots may be sighted en masse.

  Q: I notice that Robert Louis Stevenson is another of your favorites. On my trips to Scotland, I have not seen a statue, cairn or plaque in his memory. I know from the eighty or so books I have on Stevenson that he greatly impacted Scotland with his writings. On page 74 on your book, you mention “the (Princes Street) Gardens have several literary memorials including one to Stevenson - a grove of birch trees designed by Ian Hamilton Finlay…” which I plan to seek out on my next trip. Why do you suppose there are so many memorials to Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott (more so on Burns) but not to Stevenson?

  A: Stevenson had a rather ambivalent view of Edinburgh, though one of the best books on Edinburgh is his Picturesque Notes, and Edinburgh repaid the compliment. He perhaps was seen as too critical of the city of his birth and someone who left it as a young man rarely to return but that is all changing. North Berwick are holding a literary festival in his honour this summer and I suspect he is now more widely read and remembered in the city than Burns or Scot.

  Q: Not many people are aware of the two trips Benjamin Franklin made to Scotland. It is said that Franklin received the Freedom of the City Award from George Drummond, Provost of Edinburgh, and was recognized as a Guild Brother. I notice you mention Franklin in your book and wonder if, in your research, you came across much information on Franklin’s trips to Scotland?

  A: Here’s a good example of someone else knowing much more than I do and I will investigate further for the next edition. I’m also planning to add more on the visits of Jules Verne, Hans Christian Andersen and Washington Irving about which I wrote very little.

  Q: You write that “the three most important writers connected with Edinburgh” are probably “Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson.” I am surprised and pleased that you include Burns since he was only there twice as a visitor while Scott and Stevenson lived there. Does Burns impact the literary history of Edinburgh so much that in 2005 he is listed by you before Scott or Stevenson?

  A: The Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh is devoted to Burns, Scott and Stevenson so I’m not alone in my assessment. All three wrote some of their best work there, were inspired by their time in the city, have written vividly about it and are recognized as writers of international note. Burns’ visits to Edinburgh were instrumental in bringing his poetry to wider notice and one might say the same of a writer who deserves to be as well-known – James Hogg author of that haunting classic on Calvinism Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. My book lists almost a hundred ‘Edinburgh Literary Figures’ and that’s not all of them - I was criticized for not including JK Rowling. There are now plans for a new and expanded literary museum and perhaps the emphasis of the three will fade.

  Q: Your book is a good read. I would have loved spending an afternoon on the second floor of the Princes Street Starbucks viewing “the castle” across the street, with a cup of cappuccino and your book. It couldn’t get much better than that! So, thank you for your courtesies to me. Is there anything you would like to say to our readers as a parting word?

  A: Thank you for the opportunity to tell you a little bit about my book and my beloved Edinburgh. I hope you enjoy both and I’m always interested to hear from others about the city’s literary associations. (FRS: 1-31-2006)

QUOTED: "Lownie brilliantly succeeds in painting a very complete picture of this British spy."
"russophiles, amateur historians, and some Soviet experts."

Lownie, Andrew. Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring
Harry Willems
Library Journal. 141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p109.
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Lownie, Andrew. Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring. St. Martin's. Oct. 2016.448p. photos, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781250100993. $29.99; ebk. ISBN 9781250101013. POL SCI

Several years before World War II and into the mid-1950s, a cadre of young British men who studied at Cambridge University worked as spies for Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Author Lownie (John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier) spent more than two decades researching one of the most enigmatic members of the spy ring, Guy Burgess (1911-63). This unshaven, rumpled, slovenly man with a brilliant mind beguiled MI5, MI6, and the Foreign Office in Britain's intelligence apparatus during the critical war years, even leaking the atom bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. Lownie's intent is to chronicle the events that turned so many of the British elite into closet communists and particularly offer "a completely new picture of Guy Burgess ... arguing he was the most important of the Cambridge spies." Many books have been written about the spies, often concentrating on Harold Philby. Burgess and another spy from the ring, Donald Maclean, defected to Russia in 1951 as they were about to be exposed. VERDICT Lownie brilliantly succeeds in painting a very complete picture of this British spy. Russophiles, amateur historians, and some Soviet experts will be moved by this book. [See Prepub Alert, 4/3/16.]--Harry Willems, Great Bend P.L., KS

QUOTED: "well-resaerched biography" "thoroughly engrossing."

Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring
Connie Fletcher
Booklist. 113.2 (Sept. 15, 2016): p6.
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Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring. By Andrew Lownie. Oct. 2016.448p. illus. St. Martin's, $29.99 (9781250100993); e-book, $14.99 (9781250101013). 327.12.

Lownie tackles the puzzle of why a privileged young man, born and bred to the idea of social hierarchy, would be drawn to the diametrically opposed tenets of communism. Even more puzzling is that there was a ring of young, privileged Brits who betrayed their country by spying for the Soviet Union during WWII and the Cold War. Lownie makes the case that among the members of the Cambridge Spy Ring, made up of Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and Guy Burgess, the latter was the most intriguing--and possibly the most pernicious. The core of Lownie's argument is that Burgess' (and others') homosexuality--at a time when this orientation was both against the law and hypocritically reviled by the establishment--made these Cambridge undergraduates feel like outcasts in their own country, vulnerable to recruitment. This well-researched biography follows Burgess from Eton in the 1920s, through Cambridge in the '30s, on through his careers in the BBC, Foreign Office, and the British Secret Intelligence Service, and, simultaneously, his skillfully managed double life as a Soviet agent. Thoroughly engrossing.--Connie Fletcher

QUOTED: "Lownie has added a couple of new twists ... but for the most part this is an old story."

Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring
Publishers Weekly. 263.34 (Aug. 22, 2016): p104.
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Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring

Andrew Lownie. St. Martin's, $29.99 (448p) ISBN 978-1-250-10099-3

Biographer and literary agent Lownie (John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier) add his two cents to the oft-discussed subject of Britain's infamous Cold War spy circle, portraying Guy Burgess as the mastermind and a more important figure than Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, or Anthony Blunt. Burgess supplied his Soviet handlers with insight into key British foreign policy decisions, and he nurtured the group's naive idealism and guided its infdtration of British foreign intelligence. Previous historians have posited how these gentlemen became traitors; Lownie suggests that Burgess--given his predilections for whiskey, young boys, and scandal--was especially easy prey for Soviet handlers who manipulated his insatiable need for acceptance. Lownie shows the withered Englishman in Moscow, confined to his flat and supplied with care packages and visits from "friends" in the British upper echelons worried that he would rat on them. Unfortunately, few Russian sources inform this biography and too little information comes first hand. The conclusion that Burgess began spying because he needed a "moral" purpose is not well substantiated. Lownie has added a couple of new twists to this already well known spy tale, but for the most part this is an old story. (Oct.)

QUOTED: "exhaustively researched and absorbing book, the first full biographical study and likely to remain the definitive life."
"It may be hard to fathom Burgess's inner world, but that doesn't make his life unreadable."

High tea and treason: the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess clung to his Old Etonian tie as Britain's imperial elite dissolved
John Gray
New Statesman. 144.5281 (Sept. 25, 2015): p66.
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Stalin's Englishman: the Lives of Guy Burgess

Andrew Lownie

Hodder & Stoughton, 42/pp, 25 [pounds sterling]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Among the many questions that surround the Cambridge spies, one has occupied historians ever since the scale of their treachery became fully known. Why did they choose to betray their country? Several reason are given why Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross--commonly known as the Cambridge Five, though there may have been others--decided to serve the Soviet state. In the 1930s they saw the USSR as the chief bulwark against the advance of Nazism and fascism; in the Second World War, they acted in response to Britain and the USSR being allies; during the cold war, they viewed the United States as the chief threat to world peace. Above all, the spies had an overriding ideological commitment to communism. Acting on this was more important for them than clinging to old loyalties of king and country.

No doubt all of these factors played a part, but they are less than thoroughly convincing. The spies were recruited in the 1930s, when the danger of Nazism was becoming clear; but they continued to serve the Soviet Union after it entered into a pact with Nazi Germany, when many other communist sympathisers fell away, and went on serving the Soviet state after it ceased to be Britain's ally. As to the idea that they were devoted to an idea of communism, they remained loyal to the Soviet Union long after it had become clear to practically everyone--including many who had been communists--that it would never be a workers' paradise.

A more compelling reason for what the spies did may be found in the words of Kim Philby, the only one to have written a book-length account of his career in espionage:

How, where and when I became a member
of the Soviet intelligence service is a matter
for myself and my comrades. I will only say
that, when the proposition was made to me,
I did not hesitate. One does not look twice
at an offer of enrolment in an elite force.
These are the final words of Philby's introduction to My Silent War, first published in 1968. There is nothing in them about ideological conviction. Instead he chooses to focus on the elite character of the organisation he joined when he made the decision to work for the Soviet state. In so doing, he gives away more than he intended of the motives that led him and his friend Guy Burgess to act as they did. They were convinced it was about to become the world's dominant power. By switching their allegiance as they did, they could move from the British elite to which they belonged to the Soviet ruling class. But because the Soviet authorities never fully trusted any of their foreign agents, things didn't work out that way. When Burgess arrived in the Soviet Union along with Donald Maclean after the two disappeared suddenly in 1951, he discovered that he was cut off from any meaningful connection to power. He found this situation almost intolerable.

Four years before he died in exile, Burgess told a Canadian freelance reporter: "My life ended when 1 left London." He hadn't left everything of his life behind, however. Another journalist who knew him in Moscow around this time remembered "seeing him at various parties in a grey suit, rather stained and baggy, and wearing an Old Etonian tie". Some version of this tie was Burgess's badge of identity all his adult life. He was wearing it when he turned up unshaven and hungover at his club in London, while taking part in working-class hunger marches, during his trips to America (which he despised), in his years in Russia, where he wore an OE bow tie together with the Order of the Red Banner that he claimed to have received for services to the Soviet state, and on his deathbed when he expired from too much drink in Moscow in 1963.

Burgess's school tie seems to have meant more to him than anything else. But his time at Eton was not altogether successful. Good-looking and intelligent, he played football for his house, ran and rowed, joined the Eton College Officer Training Corps, read papers at an essay society, received art and drawing prizes and contributed drawings to college magazines. But the supreme prize of life at Eton--membership of Pop, a self-selected elite of between 24 and 28 boys who enjoyed privileges such as wearing coloured waistcoats and caning other boys eluded him. One reason for his failure, Andrew Lownie suggests, may have been that this elite group tended "to prefer aristocrats rather than the sons of naval officers".

A central theme of this exhaustively researched and absorbing book, the first full biographical study and likely to remain the definitive life, is that its subject was unknowable. "Burgess is certainly the most complex and enigmatic of the Cambridge spies," Lownie writes, "a man of enormous contradictions and complexities." It is true that Burgess was a different type of person from the four other men. Where the others were highly self-controlled and shunned public scrutiny, he was wildly flamboyant and often embroiled in scandal because of his drunken behaviour. But was he so inscrutable? Or was he just an extreme embodiment of his class and his time?

Born of Huguenot stock in Devon in 1911 into a military and naval family, Guy Francis de Money Burgess was educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he became a member of the Apostles, and went on to hold positions in the BBC, the intelligence services and the Foreign Office. Having joined a communist cell at Trinity College, Cambridge, he attempted to join the Communist Party of Great Britain but the party was wary of middle-class members and told him he would have to wait for five weeks. He had no difficulty in making contact in 1934 with a Soviet "illegal", Arnold Deutsch, who had already recruited Philby. Deutsch told him to leave the CPGB and publicly renounce any sympathy for communism, which he did. By 1936 he was working for MI6. In an irony that was not lost on him, one of the tasks he was given was uncovering secret party members in Oxford and Cambridge.

Burgess's assets as a spy were his network of friends and his charm. His company was sought out by Maynard Keynes, W H Auden, Winston Churchill, Isaiah Berlin, Harold Nicolson, George Orwell, Lucian Freud and many others. His homosexuality wasn't particularly important in his decision to become a Soviet agent. Spies lead double lives, as gay men were forced to do in Burgess's day; but few gay men became Soviet spies and most of the spies were not gay. He usually ascribed his sexuality to his years at Eton, though he told some people that a traumatic incident he suffered at the age of 13 when he heard a scream from his parents' bedroom, where he found his mother trapped under the body of his father, who had died while making love to her, may also have played a part. Given that Burgess was a lifelong fabulist whose account of events could never be trusted, it is impossible to know whether this is true (although his father's death, caused by heart disease, certainly left its mark on him).

In looking for reasons for Burgess's decision to work for the Soviet Union, his sexuality is largely irrelevant, as indeed is his personality. As Lownie writes, "Burgess was the product of his generation." There was nothing unusual in his attitude to communism or the Soviet Union. At the time, pretty well everyone who mattered in intellectual circles believed that liberal individualism was finished. Even many who saw little that was appealing in the Soviet system were convinced that it was winning. The Great Depression had discredited capitalism, and it seemed obvious that the future lay with a planned society.

But there was something more in the appeal of the Soviet Union for Burgess. Lownie identifies it: "Just as the 19th century had belonged to the British empire, Burgess felt the 20th century would belong to Russia." Here, Philby's career maybe instructive. He wasn't the only member of his family who betrayed his country. In the early 1920s his father, Harry St John Philby, also known as Sheikh Abdullah, a British Arabist and colonial intelligence officer, staged a conversion to Islam and became chief adviser to the Saudi king Ihn Saud. In this capacity, he advised the king that Hitler would win the Second World War, recommended the Sauds disinvest from Britain and brokered a deal with US oil interests. Though mistaken in predicting victory for Hitler, Philby Sr was prescient in his assessment that British imperial power was on its way out. His reward was wealth, and a r6-year-old Saudi slave girl whom he married. He died while visiting Kim in Lebanon in i960 and his last reported words were: "God, I'm bored."

Philby's decision to spy for the Soviet Union becomes clearer once it is seen as being--like his father's--a switch from a declining to a rising power. In the case of Burgess, there is no family history of playing the great game of empire, yet his attitude to the country to which he transferred his loyalties had a distinctly colonial ring: "I simply loathe Russia. I'm a communist, of course, but I'm a British communist, and I hate Russia!" Like quite a few western communists, he combined a profound reverence for the Soviet state with a deep contempt for Russian culture and Russians. He knew of the purges of the 1930s, the mass peasant die-off that accompanied agricultural collectivisation and what it meant to be consigned to the labour camps, but he was unmoved. When he complained about Soviet living conditions it was to protest against the quality of Soviet-made pyjamas, which he objected were unfit to sleep in. Probably the most lasting impression left on him of his time in the Soviet Union was a stainless steel tooth, inserted in the early years of his exile after a street thug attacked and knocked him down for his watch while he was living in a city on the Volga.

It may be hard to fathom Burgess's inner world, but that doesn't make his life unreadable. His scruffiness and drinking were excessive but hardly unconventional; a more moderate version of his behaviour was practically mandatory in the bohemian literary circles that he inhabited for much of his life. His opinions were the truisms of his era. If he went further than most in applying them, it may have been simply because he was more arrogant and careless. His fellow Etonian George Orwell showed much more individuality when, rather than going to Cambridge and joining the Communist Party like so many of his generation, he signed up to serve as a military policeman in Burma instead.

As an epigraph to the last chapter of Stalin's Englishman, Lownie cites Alan Bennett, the scriptwriter for the TV drama An Englishman Abroad (1983), in which Burgess is shown as melancholy and homesick during his Moscow exile (much as he was, in real life). About this, Bennett, the authentic voice of bien-pensant respectability, wrote: "I find it hard to drum up any patriotic indignation over Burgess or Blunt, or even Philby. No one has ever shown that Burgess did much harm, except to make fools of people in high places." The facts suggest otherwise. Between 1941 and 1945 he passed more than 4,600 documents to Moscow. He had access to secret information about the postwar peace conferences and the founding meetings of Nato, the UN and the OECD. In the 1950s he advised Soviet intelligence on recruitment and, according to a defector, helped plan a homosexual blackmail operation against a friend serving with a British diplomatic mission.

Loyal to neither his friends nor his country, Burgess was far from being a harmless joker. His career was an episode in the dissolution of Britain's imperial elite; looking to join the coming ruling class, he ended up on the fringes of a system that collapsed not much more than a quarter-century after he died. His life was the stuff of comedy rather than tragedy. In 1957 he wrote to the then Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, addressing him as Peter and asking for income from a trust fund paid into his bank account with Lloyds on St James's Street to be released to him in Russia, so that he could settle bills with Fortnum 8c Mason, his shirtmaker, his tailor and Collet's the bookseller. The letter worked and the money was transferred. Two months later Burgess was classified as a non-resident British subject. He remained non-dom for the rest of his days, consumed by sickly nostalgia for the country whose privileges he cherished and betrayed.

John Gray is the NS's lead book reviewer

Gray, John

QUOTED: "In a detailed, well-balanced and well-documented work, Lownie ... examines his subjects successes and failures as well as the shifting tides of critical opinion."

John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier
Publishers Weekly. 250.40 (Oct. 6, 2003): p71.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 PWxyz, LLC
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ANDREW LOWNIE. Godine, $19.95 paper (364p) ISBN 1-56792-276-8

Best known to American readers as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle and other "shockers," as Buchan referred to them, John Buchan's protean life and work encompassed a great diversity of accomplishments. In a detailed, well-balanced and well-documented work, Lownie, who has edited collections of Buchan's poems and stories, examines his subjects successes and failures as well as the shifting tides of critical opinion that have buffeted or burnished his reputation. Buchan's 65 years (1875-1940) were crowded with achievements. He attended Glasgow University and Oxford and was chancellor of Edinburgh University. His literary roles included war correspondent, various positions with Nelson Publishing Co. and deputy chairman of Reuters News Agency. His distinguished record of public service included various posts in South Africa, WWI director of information, MP for the Scottish Universities and governor-general of Canada. In addition to his works of fiction, Buchan wrote and published essays, poetry, biographies and histories, and he edited numerous other works. And yet somehow Buchan never seemed to grab the grand prize expected of him. Lownie argues quite convincingly that Buchan had too many talents pulling him in various directions--torn between romantic and practical impulses--and that ill health compounded his difficulties. He also felt himself to be always the outsider: "regarded as a Scotsman in England and an Englishman in Scotland." Regardless of successes or failures, Buchan had, and continues to have, a shaping influence on espionage fiction, with his books still being read and adapted for radio, television and film. Illus. (Nov.)

QUOTED: "Andrew Lownie takes you district by district to places with literary associations. His guide is ideal for walks."

A writers' town
The Economist. 356.8183 (Aug. 12, 2000): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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THE LITERARY COMPANION TO EDINBURGH. By Andrew Lownie. Methuen; Revised edition; 206 pages; Pounds9.99

FOR centuries before the month-long Edinburgh Festival, which begins this week, the fame of the city rested heavily on its writers. Some of them, such as Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, won world renown. Others--Dunbar, Fergusson and Garioch--were of more local repute. From many writers who took the town for their subject, we get mockery and dismissal, of course. But the tone is most often affectionate. Scott called Edinburgh, "my own romantic town", and, though he fled the climate, Stevenson thought that no stars could be as beautiful as Edinburgh's street lamps. Edwin Muir, an Orkney man who lived for a time in Edinburgh, attributed this literary energy to an extravagant inquisitiveness about other people. Perhaps it is a consequence of the old Edinburgh way of life, when all classes lived an intense and convivial life in close proximity. The poets in particular, from 15th-century William Dunbar onwards, seem to have revelled in it.

Andrew Lownie takes you district by district to places with literary associations. His guide is ideal for walks. The descriptions are mostly from novels set in Edinburgh, of which there are several hundred, and more than 100 have been published in the last ten years. Mr Lownie is eager not to impose his own opinions--even widely held and uncontested views are hedged with some such cautious phrase as "thought by many critics"--and he is addicted to understatement. Scott, who was the most celebrated novelist on the planet for at least a century, is said only to have had a "considerable success".

In expanding and up-dating for this new edition, Mr Lownie has missed some changes but caught others. He omits to mention, for example, that a statue by Sandy Stoddart of David Hume (another satisfied resident) has taken up a prominent position in the High Street. On the other hand, he takes full account of Irvine Welsh's novels about the drug generation, set in the "dirty, cold, wet, run-down" council districts on the edge of the city. The guide has a useful bibliography of books about Edinburgh and its literature, and charming illustrations by another celebrated Edinburgh character, Richard Demarco, impresario, professor and incurable optimist.

QUOTED: "Although Lownie's book is not the best Buchan biography (Jane Adam Smith's outshines it), this book gives a good account of Buchan the man of affairs and Buchan the versatile and gifted writer. But we do not get much new insight into the man. Perhaps, as his son said, he was a distant and elusive private person. Perhaps, too, there were paradoxes and internal inconsistencies making it hard to plumb the depths."

John Buchan: the Presbyterian cavalier
Presbyterian Record. 121.2 (Feb. 1997): p42-3.
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John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier by Andrew Lownie (Constable, 1995). Reviewed by Heath Macquarrie.

Canada has had 25 governors general. Two of them, the Earl of Aberdeen and Lord Tweedsmuir, were Presbyterians. Both were active members of St. Andrew's Church in Ottawa.

Rating governors general is an imprecise exercise and about as difficult as ranking universities or preachers. But I believe a strong case could be made for placing Lord Tweedsmuir in the highest rank of incumbents of Rideau Hall.

When he was offered the exalted post in early 1935, he was plain John Buchan, the first commoner ever chosen. But King George V insisted the new Governor General be a peer. And so it was. The Prime Minister of Canada, another Presbyterian, William Lyon Mackenzie King was not amused. He wanted the person in Rideau Hall to be a commoner like the prime minister.

When the new Governor General arrived in Quebec City on November 2, the Prime Minister's welcoming speech had a brilliant reference to the recent ennoblement of the new arrival:

"It is as John Buchan, the commoner chosen to represent His Majesty in other spheres, that you will find the warmest welcome and an abiding place in the hearts of Canadians. In your aristocracy of mind and wealth of imagination, you are the friend of thousands of Canadian homes."

Buchan was a famous man of letters and statecraft before he came to Canada. His literary output in fiction, biography, history and newspaper columns was vast. The great historian George M. Trevelyan described Buchan's book on Sir Walter Scott as "the best one-volume biography in the language." A literary critic in The Spectator was so enthusiastic about Buchan's novel Witchwood that he dubbed the author "a modern and terse Walter Scott."

His literary output flourished in range and quantity, and his writings were translated into 16 languages. But, with all of this, he found a career in university politics and administration. He was involved in the massive reconstruction program in South Africa after the Boer War. During the First World War, he was a main figure in the Information Office. From 1927 to 1935, he was lauded for his eloquence in the House of Commons. He was a confidant of the greatest politicians in Britain.

Buchan's father was a Free Church of Scotland minister, and his Calvinist background showed throughout John Buchan's public career. Although his father was a devoted pastor, his mother was the more ardent Presbyterian. Her famous son always honoured her favourite motto: "Do what has to be done -- at once." He also wrote her every day. When, at one stage in his adult life, he regularly attended the local Church of England about 90 metres from his home, his mother was disgusted. Doubtless, the greatest thrill in all her 80 years came to this redoubtable lady in 1933 when John Buchan served as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. She relished the pomp and glory even more than her illustrious son.

Lownie believes John Buchan "fitted more into his 65 years than probably any other man in his generation." His capacity for work showed in his years in Canada. He travelled more than any of his predecessors. His famous trip to the Arctic was the longest ever undertaken by a Governor General. It was widely publicized and gained international attention for the region and the distinguished trekker. Twenty years before John Diefenbaker's "Visions of the North," Buchan saw the tremendous potential in Canada's northern domain.

A gifted speaker, Buchan made countless addresses throughout the nation, enchanting his audiences. He took up skating, skiing and curling. He was convocation speaker at Harvard and also received an honorary degree at Yale. He was a close confidant of President Roosevelt and, on a visit to Washington, was asked to address the House of Representatives and also the Senate, the first British person so honoured.

Robert Graves wondered how Buchan could keep so many balls in the air at one time. A good question! Along with all his labours during his first two years in Canada, he wrote a biography of the Emperor Augustus, drawing upon the resources of the Library of Parliament and of Laval University.

Although Lownie's book is not the best Buchan biography (Jane Adam Smith's outshines it), this book gives a good account of Buchan the man of affairs and Buchan the versatile and gifted writer. But we do not get much new insight into the man. Perhaps, as his son said, he was a distant and elusive private person. Perhaps, too, there were paradoxes and internal inconsistencies making it hard to plumb the depths.

Lownie thinks it revealing that James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, was one of Buchan's great heroes. "Here was a Calvinist/Platonist hero, who combined a life of action and thought, the sort of scholar/gypsy that so appealed to Buchan's own temperament." The author sees a Calvinist sense of guiltand duty in many of the characters in Buchan's novels. Hugh in the Lodge in the Wilderness says, "I never feel quite happy unless I am a little miserable.

Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan) died on February 11, 1940. Three days later, he was buried from St. Andrew's Church where, a week earlier, he had read the lesson. The funeral service, conducted by Rev. Alexander Fergusson, was broadcast throughout the British Commonwealth and the United States. Grattan O'Leary of the Ottawa Journal noted that the crowds in the streets were the largest since the funeral of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. He attributed this to the instinctive recognition of a great man. A few years earlier, President Roosevelt had declared Tweedsmuir the best Governor General Canada ever had.

Many years ago, while on the faculty of McGill University, I was dean of residence at The Presbyterian College. One of the most interesting theological students there was William Isaacs. He often said, jokingly, that Canada's best days were when there was a Presbyterian in the prime minister's office and another at Government House. Now, decades later, leading historians such as Michael Bliss consider Mackenzie King our greatest prime minister. Tweedsmuir's virtues are still shining.

Senator Heath Macquarrie is the author of Red Tory Blues and a former convener of the Committee on International Affairs of The Presbyterian Church in Canada.

QUOTED: "His own assessments of Buchan's thrillers are generally shrewd and well informed, even if he might have made more of that poignant and very serious book Witch Wood."
"Mr. Lownie has done a useful job in providing a portrait of the man behind the books."

John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier
R.D. Kernohan
Contemporary Review. 267.1558 (Nov. 1995): p276.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
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Andrew Lownie. Constable. 20.00[pounds]. 0-09-47-2500-4.

John Buchan can stand a substantial new biography fifty-five years after his death. when he was Governor-General of Canada (as Lord Tweedsmuir) and still near the zenith of his popularity as a writer. Janet Adam Smith's sympathetic account of him, better informed and balanced than subsequent criticism, appeared in 1965 when it was uncertain how long Buchan's popular fame as a writer of `shockers' could survive. But, although the only shocks now come from Buchan's uninhibited patriotism, sexual reticence, and eminently respectable heroes, more of the novels are now being republished. Richard Hannay has survived, Dickson McCunn revived. There must be countless new readers who know them and not their creator. A book was needed to fill a gap. Andrew Lownie has provided it, though his biography is intentionally light on one important area and unintentionally unsatisfactory in others. He has deferred to the forthcoming study by the foremost literary authority on Buchan, Professor David Daniell, though his own assessments of Buchan's thrillers are generally shrewd and well informed, even if he might have made more of that poignant and very serious book Witch Wood.

But, although he recognises Buchan as a skilful and valuable historian of the First World War and not a mere propagandist, the author gives too little attention to Buchan as a serious biographer and lay theologian. The biographies of Scott and Cromwell, as well as of Montrose (from which Witch Wood was a spin-off) are more important books than is allowed here. And despite the Presbyterian Cavalier title -- which Buchan created for Montrose, allowed to Haig and Stonewall Jackson, and rather fancied for himself -- Mr. Lownie is slightly weak on the nuances of Presbyterianism as well as the mixture of theology and history which shaped Buchan's religious thinking, theologically liberal but philosophically and politically conservative.

On the other hand Mr. Lownie has rightly rejected the notion that Buchan was a snobbish and eventually rather anglified Scotsman on the make. The book sees past this very superficial view, and recognises Buchan's considerable authority in writing about Scots language, literature, and national identity, though it might have made more of the power of deploying dialogue in Scots which he shared with his hero Sir Walter Scott.

It also sets on record the pro-Zionist activities and attitudes, as well as Jewish contacts, which counter the notion (based on snatches of his characters' dialogue) that Buchan was an anti-Semite and effectively relates Buchan's anxiety about the thin crust of civilisation to the impact of the First World War, which cost him dear in loss of friends and a beloved brother, and its aftermath of Bolshevik and Nazi totalitarianism.

Buchan, a son of the manse profoundly influenced by both Calvinism and classicism, was a man of extraordinary parts but probably a better thinker than a politician -- and one whose serious thinking shaped the hastily but brilliantly written plots and characterisation of the books he wrote for fun and money. He wanted to be a statesman, which demanded a tiresome apprenticeship as a politician, although when he belatedly entered the House of Commons it was as a Scottish universities member. But he had not the luck, timing, dogmatism, or capacity for ruthless self-seeking to match his ambitions. He was a romantic Tory rather than a very High one, and (as Andrew Lownie discerns) a moderate both as imperialist and Scottish unionist as well as a conciliator in the age of class war.

There was an element of frustration even in his years of fame, success and honours. Without it there would not have been such a flow of books. Mr. Lownie has done a useful job in providing a portrait of the man behind the books.

QUOTED: "The attempt to include everything is more laudable to the compilers than flattering to Buchan's reputation. Some pieces were deservedly unpublished and others immature, though their author's native thrift sometimes ensured later recycling of stanzas and ideas."

John Buchan's Collected Poems
R.D. Kernohan
Contemporary Review. 269.1567 (Aug. 1996): p109.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
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John Buchan remains avidly read as a thriller-writer. He has been rehabilitated as a war historian. His relatively neglected biographies of Montrose, Cromwell, and Scott will survive and be revived. Buchan, who died in 1940 as Lord Tweedsmuir and Governor-General of Canada, has also been presented recently as more than a minor politician. But was this romantic Scottish Tory more than a very minor poet? Some of his poems were published obscurely, though others were scattered through anthologies from the years of his greatest fame. They have now been brought together, along with unpublished items, by William Milne and Andrew Lownie, Buchan's most recent biographer.

The attempt to include everything is more laudable to the compilers than flattering to Buchan's reputation. Some pieces were deservedly unpublished and others immature, though their author's native thrift sometimes ensured later recycling of stanzas and ideas. A couple of private jokes in the taste of their times have revived charges of 'racism' and anti-Semitism, however refuted these were by the actions and opinions of Buchan's maturity.

Nothing in the collection stakes a claim to a place in English poetry to match Buchan's place in other continents in the world of letters - notably through the biographies and (or) thrillers. But it revives his right to a place in Scottish literature, both through what he wrote in Scots and what he wrote or published about it. He was no Burns, yet he wrote profoundly about the language of Burns. He was no MacDiarmid but suffered that cantankerous genius amiably enough and included him (as C. M. Grieve) in his Scots anthology of 1924. But Buchan did use Scots, in dialogue and in verse, in ways that invite comparison with those of his own hero, Scott.

There is a freshness in his best Scots poetry that stands time's tests better than most of his elegant English verse, except for lighter-hearted trifles like the invocation of angling that ends:

. . . with St Izaak the Divine We worship at the waterside

There are also English verses, but more Scots ones, with a place in First World War poetry. The Buchan of politics and army public relations could write about 'the stern sacrament of war' but as private man and poet he knew the pain and loss, not only of Oxford friends, but of his brother, Alastair. But even then his lighter touch was most effective, as in the lament for the Borderer killed in France for whom Heaven would have to provide moorland streams, and whose 'poaching whim' would:

. . . sune grow tired, wi' lawfu' flee Made frae the wings of cherubim

R. D. KERNOHAN

Willems, Harry. "Lownie, Andrew. Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 109. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371265&it=r&asid=e2d4b7a776e78d06b5bd270b6598f595. Accessed 11 May 2017. Fletcher, Connie. "Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 6. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464980735&it=r&asid=dc35e20b322abe5c61b27e044a2bcceb. Accessed 11 May 2017. "Stalin's Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring." Publishers Weekly, 22 Aug. 2016, p. 104. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461609351&it=r&asid=1df582cb83b25026b58025a8a8fdffd1. Accessed 11 May 2017. Gray, John. "High tea and treason: the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess clung to his Old Etonian tie as Britain's imperial elite dissolved." New Statesman, 25 Sept. 2015, p. 66+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA431532671&it=r&asid=458c78f0642932b95f2eeab882b36a70. Accessed 11 May 2017. "John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier." Publishers Weekly, 6 Oct. 2003, p. 71+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA110404392&it=r&asid=c9a054228ff9fa07cc85e89bf344fe0d. Accessed 11 May 2017. "A writers' town." The Economist, 12 Aug. 2000, p. 75. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA64196463&it=r&asid=ef6d9bee6a6180e14a406dfa8b7b436c. Accessed 11 May 2017. "John Buchan: the Presbyterian cavalier." Presbyterian Record, Feb. 1997, pp. 42-3. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA30293269&it=r&asid=321fa2f799ca24b60eef0d0de3656c6c. Accessed 11 May 2017. Kernohan, R.D. "John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier." Contemporary Review, vol. 267, no. 1558, 1995, p. 276+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18038973&it=r&asid=6fe2ec0198a50632fd8500f529952d6c. Accessed 11 May 2017. Kernohan, R.D. "John Buchan's Collected Poems." Contemporary Review, vol. 269, no. 1567, 1996, p. 109+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18801070&it=r&asid=cb691eae95656a25fe936ab2c508fb99. Accessed 11 May 2017.

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/10/stalins-englishman-lives-guy-burgess-andrew-lownie-review
  Word count: 1127

  Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess by Andrew Lownie – review
  Burgess – charming and often drunk – was a much more dangerous and effective spy than has been assumed. Here are the latest revelations about the Cambridge spy ring

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  Richard Norton-Taylor
  Thursday 10 September 2015 04.30 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 14.33 EDT

  Is there anything significant left to say about members of the Cambridge spy ring, Moscow Centre’s “magnificent five”? The answer, judging by this book, is a resounding yes. Guy Burgess is often dismissed as the least useful member. “No one has ever shown that Burgess did much harm, except to make fools of people in high places,” wrote Alan Bennett in the introduction to Single Spies and Talking Heads.

  Andrew Lownie’s argument, and it is convincing, is that, far from being a relatively minor figure, an irritant and merely a source of embarrassment to Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross, Burgess for years passed on thousands of classified documents to Moscow, many containing extraordinarily useful information, including the west’s position on key issues and negotiations at the start of the cold war. Burgess helped to get Philby a post in MI6, and persuade the Russians to recruit Blunt and Cairncross. He was the leader of the group, Lownie says, and held it together.

  Burgess not only spied for Moscow, but on behalf of competing factions within the British government. He spied on Neville Chamberlain for MI6 and the Foreign Office. At one stage, he wangled himself into MI5, not as an officer, but as one of its agents. MI6 suggested he should penetrate the Russians by arranging to get a Communist party post in Moscow, and at one point he was simultaneously running agents for both British and Soviet intelligence. Moscow Centre thought MI6’s suggestion was too risky for the mercurial Burgess and, Lownie notes, “a distraction from the main target of penetrating British intelligence”.

  Along the way, as an extra reward for his 30 years of research, Lownie, an indefatigable literary agent, discovered a published memoir in Oxford’s Bodleian library by Sir Patrick Reilly, in which the former chairman of Whitehall’s Joint Intelligence Committee describes Wilfrid Mann, an atomic scientist who worked for MI6 in Washington, as a Soviet spy. (Lownie claims Mann confessed and in return agreed to spy for the CIA, though Mann himself always denied it.)

  How could Burgess, someone so indiscreet, a homosexual (at a time when homosexual relations were illegal), someone so promiscuous, frequently extremely drunk, with breath smelling of booze and tobacco and egg stains on his jumpers, with grime under his finger nails, and who committed a number of drink-driving offences, not just survive in the bohemian circles of the British establishment (that included Victor Rothschild, Harold Nicolson and Clarissa Churchill, Winston’s niece, among many others), but thrive among senior MI5 and MI6 officers and diplomats in the very centre of Whitehall and its powerful and influential decision-making?

  Stalin’s Englishman tells the reader as much about the culture of a British elite in the 1930s, during the war and immediate postwar years, as about spying. Burgess, a spoilt child, was indulged as a “licensed jester”. Lownie quotes a Cambridge contemporary: “He was very open about his communism and homosexuality but one didn’t believe most things Guy said. A very amusing talker, but he was a natural liar.” A natural cover for a spy.

  The Cambridge spy ring: what the biographers say
  As a brace of new biographies and a television series spotlight the ruthless espionage of Kim Philby, Richard Norton-Taylor examines our fascination with the Cambridge Five
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  He seemed to charm anyone he sought out, including Churchill, and attracted an astonishing array of contacts, as well as lovers, as he flitted between MI5, MI6, the BBC and the FO. His open defiance of security procedures – not the normal behaviour of a spy – was indulged because, Lownie says, the FO at the time “felt like a large family – many of the staff had been educated and grown up together – paternalistic and trusting. Because they thought they acted honourably, they assumed everyone else did as well”. One top FO official put Burgess’s behaviour down to “innocent eccentricity”.

  Given the sheer quantity of information he, and other members of the Cambridge spy ring, passed on to their Russian handlers, it is not surprising that Stalin, paranoid at the best of times, at first suspected them of being agents provocateurs planted by British intelligence. Basing his claims on a wide range of sources, Lownie reckons Burgess revealed to Moscow many secrets, including prewar arguments over appeasement, details of the planned Sicily landings in 1943 and the decision to postpone an invasion of France until 1944, the British and American position on the postwar status of Berlin, early negotiations leading to the setting up of Nato, and advance notice of US military plans in the Korean war.

  Some of the Russian sources (including Yuri Modin, Burgess’s Russian controller), and the KGB archives (for which Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain with an immense cache of papers, was responsible), may have exaggerated, bragging about the intelligence they collected. But even taking this into account, Lownie has made a convincing case, demonstrating that even now the story of the Cambridge spy ring can continue to shock.

  In 1951, Burgess was kicked out of Washington, where almost unbelievably he had been given a posting at the British embassy, after further bouts of outrageous drinking and after being caught speeding three times in one day in his Lincoln convertible. He arrived at Southampton in May 1951 and immediately told Blunt what Philby had found out about the investigation of Maclean. Burgess and Maclean fled to France a few days later. They ended up up in Moscow, where Burgess died in 1963.

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  A panicking Whitehall establishment mounted a desperate damage-limitation exercise, denying and then playing down the significance of the Cambridge spies. Philby was forced to leave MI6, but his friends there continued to protect him. He fled to Russia in 1963. Blunt and Cairncross were offered immunity from prosecution before being outed many years later. But we may not have heard the last of them. More than a million FO files are still being kept secret. They include 19 boxes on Burgess.

  • To order Stalin’s Englishman for £20 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrew-lownie/stalins-englishman/
  Word count: 426

  STALIN'S ENGLISHMAN
  Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring
  by Andrew Lownie
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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  A biography of “the most complex and enigmatic of the Cambridge Spies,” a group of men recruited during the 1930s to spy for the Soviet Union.

  Guy Burgess (1911-1963) was well-born, well-educated, intelligent, and completely spoiled. Through his days at the Royal Naval College, Eton, and Cambridge, he fought to be accepted and, failing that, turned to outraging the bourgeois. In the 1930s, Cambridge was an intellectual maelstrom, and students felt that their generation had to do something significant. Through societies such as the Apostles and the Cambridge University Socialist Society, the lure of communism provided an answer. Leaving school, many then got on with life, but Burgess and at least four of his friends ended up spying for the communists. His antics are legion, his drunkenness unceasing. The book is full of dramatically opposing visions of his personality, but one element that all agree on was his brilliance. Politics, sex, and gossip were Burgess’ main interests, all easily fed by his work at the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5, and MI6. Also well-fed were his Russian controllers, to whom he transmitted thousands of documents. In fact, he gave the Russians so many documents that many were never translated, decoded, or read. But Burgess was politically naïve, ignoring the failures of communism’s purges and communes. In this entertaining biography, literary agent Lownie (The Edinburgh Literary Companion, 2005, etc.) gives the impression that spying was almost a game for Burgess; deceit was integral to his life. At the same time, he was upfront about his homosexuality and, when drunk, often spoke of working for the Russians. He was never monogamous, cruel to his lovers, a natural liar, manipulative, louche, and slovenly, and he always did just what he wanted. He never had boundaries as a child, and even his mother said perhaps the Russian discipline might be good for him. Lownie amply demonstrates Burgess’ wily intelligence in navigating the spy’s life while often living so indiscreetly.

  A crack biography of a man who was a preposterous enigma.

  Pub Date: Oct. 4th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-1-250-10099-3
  Page count: 448pp
  Publisher: St. Martin's
  Review Posted Online: July 19th, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1st, 2016

• Telegraph
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/stalins-englishman-andrew-lownie-review-book-overturns-view-of-cambridge-spy/
  Word count: 1219

  QUOTED: "Stalin's Englishman is superb, more riveting than any spy novel."

  Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess by Andrew Lownie, review: 'startlingly revisionist'

  Guy Burgess at Steven Runciman's house on Eigg, summer 1932
  Guy Burgess at Steven Runciman's house on Eigg, summer 1932 CREDIT: STEVEN RUNCIMAN ESTATE WITH THANKS TO ANN SHUKMAN
  Lewis Jones
  24 SEPTEMBER 2015 • 8:00AM
  Guy Burgess has long been regarded as the least significant of the Cambridge traitors. Kim Philby ran the Soviet section of MI6 while a colonel in the KGB, Donald Maclean gave Russia America's atomic secrets, and Anthony Blunt the intelligence from Bletchley Park, while Burgess got drunk, was sacked from various minor jobs and, making a virtue of his chronic indiscretion, told anyone who would listen that he was spying for the Russians.

  The other three have had many books written about them, featuring Burgess as light relief, but now the literary agent Andrew Lownie has produced a comprehensive, fascinating and startlingly revisionist life.

  The Maisky Diaries ed by Gabriel Gorodetsky, review: 'a spectacular find'

  Far from being the joker in the pack, Lownie shows that Burgess was actually the ace in the hole. Yuri Modin, who was his KGB handler, wrote that "the real leader was Burgess. He held the group together, infused it with his energy and led it into battle." Modin was obviously fond of Burgess, but Lownie's account tends to justify his assessment. Over a 15-year period he passed on reams of top-secret material, at one stage in such volume that he asked the KGB to provide him with a suitcase.

  Guy Burgess, third from left, at Eton
  Guy Burgess, third from left, at Eton CREDIT: COURTESY OF THE PROVOST AND FELLOWS OF ETON COLLEGE
  In 1939, when he was working at the War Office, he told the Russians that Britain had no intention of making a military pact with them, and thereby precipitated the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which he eagerly defended. From 1946, as private secretary to Hector McNeil, a minister of state at the Foreign Office, he had access to the minutes of the Cabinet Office, the Defence Committee and the Chiefs of the General Staff, and in 1948 he gave the Russians a good idea of British policy during the Berlin Crisis. During the Korean War, when he was a second secretary at the Washington embassy, he gave America's plans to Moscow, which passed them on to Peking. And after his defection in 1951 he did useful work in Moscow, in propaganda and intelligence analysis.

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  EM Forster, a fellow member of the Cambridge Apostles, famously declared that given the choice of betraying his country or his friends he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. But Burgess betrayed his friends as well as his country. In 1937, for example, he attempted to recruit Goronwy Rees, then a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and confessed that he was an agent for the Comintern. Six years later, fearing that Rees might expose him, he suggested that despite their "personal friendship and attachment" Rees should be "liquidated", and offered to do the job himself.

  A cartoon of Stalin drawn by Guy Burgess
  A cartoon of Stalin drawn by Guy Burgess CREDIT: ANTHONY AND SIMON BURGESS
  He even betrayed Philby who, having arranged for Maclean's escape, told Burgess: "Don't you go too." He knew that Burgess's flight would betray his own position to the Americans (as it duly did), and never forgave him.

  What makes Burgess so interesting is his contradictory character. Habitually drunk and relentlessly promiscuous, he was also filthy, rude and obnoxious. Rees remembered him as a house guest: "the cigarette ends stuffed down the back of sofas, the scorched eiderdowns, the ironwilled determination to have garlic in every dish, including porridge and Christmas pudding, the endless drinking, the terrible trail of havoc".

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  But he could also be delightful company, generous, good with children, and apparently loyal. He counted Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden among his many admirers - he seems to have known everyone - and Lord Hailsham remembered him as "a charming, sensitive and civilised person".

  A cartoon of Lenin drawn by Guy Burgess
  A cartoon of Lenin drawn by Guy Burgess CREDIT: ANTHONY AND SIMON BURGESS
  He was also intensely English, and by his own lights a patriot. The description Lownie gives of him in Moscow irresistibly recalls Alan Bennett's portrait of Burgess in An Englishman Abroad (1983), as played by Alan Bates, a dissolute baby in lonely exile, appalled by Russian food.

  His life effectively ended when he left England, and he always read the London papers and wore an Old Etonian bow tie with his Order of the Red Banner. A visitor remembered him shouting at the supposedly hidden microphone in his flat: "I hate Russia. I simply loathe Russia. I'm a communist, of course, but I'm a British communist, and I hate Russia." After his death in 1963, aged 52, his ashes were secretly interred in the family plot in West Meon, Hampshire.

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  Lownie spent 20 years researching this book, and he provides what is surely the definitive account of Burgess's career as a spy, and a fully rounded biography, which is inevitably damning, but also necessarily sympathetic. Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was of Huguenot stock, and would compare the flight of his ancestors to Britain with his own to Moscow three centuries later.

  His father was a naval officer, who died in 1943, aged 43 - while making love to his wife, according to Burgess, who said he had to pull him off her, an experience he claimed made him homosexual. She later married a retired colonel, whom Burgess used to bait by passing the port the wrong way.

  Burgess playing the piano in Russia
  Burgess playing the piano in Russia CREDIT: PRIVATE ESTATE
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  Is Eton career was interrupted by two years at Dartmouth Naval College, which was then extremely brutal, and where he was judged "excellent officer material". He was a brilliant undergraduate at Trinity, taking a first in Part I of the History Tripos, and joining the Pitt Club as well as the Apostles. He also joined the Communist Party, which was run by James Klugman, who claimed to have recruited "all but three of one year's intake of scholars".

  After Maclean confessed to Burgess that he was a Soviet agent, Burgess insisted on joining him, despite the reservations of Philby, who later wrote that Burgess "must have been one of the very few people to have forced themselves into the Soviet special service". Recruited in December 1934, he was given the code name Madchen, meaning Little Girl.

  Lownie's treatment of his fiendishly complicated and revelatory material is assured, and he shapes his narrative brilliantly. Stalin's Englishman is superb, more riveting than any spy novel.

  Stalin's Englishman
  Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess by Andrew Lownie

  448pp, Hodder & Stoughton, £25, ebook £16.99

• Independent
  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/stalins-englishman-by-andrew-lownie-book-review-even-the-soviets-didnt-trust-guy-burgess-10494188.html
  Word count: 699

  Stalin's Englishman by Andrew Lownie, book review: Even the Soviets didn't trust Guy Burgess
  The 'outsider' spy is vividly described, but might have escaped lightly
  Mary Dejevsky @IndyVoices Thursday 10 September 2015 15:00 BST0 comments

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  Protective circle: time and again, people turned a blind eye to Burgess's misdemeanours Getty Images
  As one of this country's foremost literary agents, Andrew Lownie certainly knows what makes a good book, and in Stalin's Englishman, he has delivered one of his own, many times over. This life – or, as his neat subtitle has it, "lives" – of Guy Burgess commands authority from page 1.

  Lownie takes the classical approach to this biography – strictly chronological, with a wealth of personal detail from the Soviet agent's contemporaries, and modest authorial comment on top. The pace is brisk; the account of Burgess's school days is, in its way, as absorbing as the pile-up of events surrounding his defection. The old ways of biography can still be the best.

  The author allows himself to be led by his abundant material, much of it from interviews conducted over decades. The voices of those who knew Burgess come over loud and clear – notably that of the academic, Goronwy Rees, who expresses his reservations about Burgess with particular eloquence.

  There is also the unforgettable comment from Burgess's ageing mother, who said she thought Soviet-style discipline was rather good for him.

  How much Lownie adds to the familiar picture of Burgess – dissolute, depraved, amoral but to many also engaging – is mostly in the detail. The big questions gain no really new answers.

  Take the damage Burgess may – or may not have done – to national security during his 20-year career, hopping between seemingly second- and third-tier jobs at the BBC and the Foreign Office. Lownie acknowledges the different opinions, from those who dismiss his activities as mostly ineffectual, to those – such as the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1955 – who concluded that "very nearly all US-UK high-level planning information... must be considered compromised".

  For himself, Lownie offers a judgement that will ring true in an age when East Germany's Stasi files have been opened, and Edward Snowden's voluminous leaks from the NSA are still being assessed. Burgess, Lownie suggests, passed on such a multitude of documents that they were far more than the ponderous Soviet bureaucracy could handle.

  "The irony is", he comments, "that the more explosive the material, the less likely it was to be trusted, as Stalin and his cohorts couldn't believe that it wasn't a plant." Similar misapprehension dogged Burgess's defection. He received a less than heroic welcome in Moscow because the Russians thought he could only be a double agent.

  Lownie also accepts the conventional view of the spy's motives – the spirit of the age, the greater threat, as was perceived, from Nazism, his critical view of British policy towards the Soviet Union. But he adds, convincingly, the thought that Burgess's sense of being an outsider, of never quite attaining membership of the elite of the elite, drove him to seek somewhere to star.

  Which leads me to my one frustration with this biography. It is too fair! Burgess (Eton and Cambridge) may indeed have felt himself an outsider, but consider the – many double-barrelled – names within his circle and the pedigree of those whose patronage he enjoyed. Time and again, these people turned a blind eye to his egregious misdemeanours for no better reason than his social status as "one of us" – a notably charming and clever one at that. Even after he defected, he received visits from his mother and retained access to his funds in Britain.

  Of course, all this happened more than 50 years ago and institutions such as the Foreign Office and the BBC have had to change. But I wonder, deep down, how much.

  It is easy to argue that Lownie could have vented just a little indignation – but then he would have written a different book. With a distinguished biography now in the shops, however, perhaps now is the time for a polemic.

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