Among the "Cambridge Spies"—brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray British secrets to the Soviet Union—Guy Burgess was the most important, complex, and fascinating member of the group. With ease, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive documents which he passed to his Russian handlers. Even when he was under suspicion, the fabled charm which endeared him to influential establishment figures (including Winston Churchill) prevented his exposure as a spy for many years. Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess and the discovery of hitherto secret files, Andrew Lownie tells Burgess's intriguing, chilling, tragi-comic story, and this biography includes 24 pages of black and white photographs.