Guy Burgess is the most important, complex and interesting of The Cambridge Spies – immortalised in plays such as Alan Bennett’s ‘An Englishman Abroad’ and Julian Mitchell’s 'Another Country’ - yet there has never been a proper biography of him - until now.

In Stalin’s Englishman, Andrew Lownie presents a completely new picture of Guy Burgess. Drawing on thirty years of research in archives around the world, close connections with the Intelligence Community in Britain and the US, hitherto secret files and interviews with over a hundred people who knew Burgess, most of whom have never spoken before.

It charts his life from naval cadet and Eton schoolboy to brilliant Cambridge

undergraduate, from BBC Talks producer, diplomat and agent working for

both MI5 and MI6 to his lonely tragic-comic exile in Russia and reveals how

he was recruited and who he, in turn, recruited as well as the secrets he passed to the Russians from before WW2 up to his flight into exile behind the Iron Curtain in 1951.

Complicated, revelatory: a superb biography more riveting than a spy novel. (Telegraph)

Not every question has been answered, but most have, and those that remain probably never will be. (Independent on Sunday)

Is there anything significant left to say about members of the Cambridge spy ring, Moscow's 'magnificent five'? The answer, judging by this book, is a resounding yes. (Guardian)