Our eternal fascination with spies and secrecy has meant that the infiltration of the British establishment by five of the most gifted people of their generation, from the 1930s onwards on behalf of Russia, was well trawled over in their lifetimes. Can there really be any more to say about the Cambridge spies, two decades after the last of them died? Or is Andrew Lownie’s biography of Guy Burgess, who died a broken figure having fled to Russia in 1963, a case of there being nothing wrong with retelling an old but good story, as some have recently?
