[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Thanks for these great links, Bookworm_Girl. Both fascinating. I hadn't realised that Blunt was a third cousin of the Queen-Mother, which goes some way to understanding how he was protected for so long. And I really enjoyed the Knightley article. So ironic that the spy world is so paranoid that they don't trust even their most valuable assets.

My copy has just arrived at last - hurrah! - so I shall start reading it today.

I find this subject extremely fascinating so I am reading A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre since it was available at my library. A light nonfiction read but still interesting.

Bookpossum, your statement reminded me of this quote in Macintyre's book.

The Cambridge spies—Guy Burgess in MI6, Donald Maclean in the Foreign Office, Anthony Blunt in MI5, John Cairncross in Bletchley Park, and Kim Philby in Section V—were producing top-level intelligence. But their very productivity posed a conundrum. In the insanely distrustful world of Soviet espionage, the quality, quantity, and consistency of this information rendered it suspect. A misgiving began to take root in Moscow that British intelligence must be mounting an elaborate, multilayered deception through Philby and his friends; they must all be double agents. Moreover, Philby’s story failed to meet firmly held Soviet preconceptions: MI6 was supposed to be impregnable, yet Philby had practically sauntered into the organization; he had been a left-winger at university, yet supposedly rigorous background checks had failed to pick this up; he had been asked to find evidence that his own father was a spy and had failed to do so. Was Philby a plant?

I also liked this one in relation to how reliable are Victor Maskell's memories in Banville's book.

Spies are particularly skilled at misremembering the past, and the protagonists in this story are all guilty, to some extent, of distorting their own histories.

Macintyre was looking for a different point of view for his book from the numerous others that have been published. He chose to focus on friendship and how they were able to deceive the system for so long. I thought Banville also did a great job of capturing these aspects in his fictional narrative. From the New York Times Book Review about Macintyre's book:

He has written a narrative about that most complex of topics, friendship: Why does it exist, what causes people to seek it and how do we know when it’s real? The world of upper-crust young Englishmen provides a rugged yet rewarding terrain for such an exploration. Taught on the playing fields of Eton to shield themselves from vulnerability, they mask their feelings for one another with jokes, cricket-watching, drinking and “a very distinctive brand of protective dishonesty.”

Macintyre also takes on a related subject: the tribal loyalties of the inbred social class, on the fraying fringe of Britain’s aristocracy, that nurtured such friendships, both real and feigned, and created the boys’ club that populated its foreign, colonial and intelligence services. Members harbored, Macintyre writes, “a shared set of assumptions about the world and their privileged place in it.” While watching the races at Ascot one day, Nick Elliott mentioned to a diplomat friend of his father, who was the headmaster of Eton, that he would like to be a spy. “I am relieved you have asked me for something so easy,” the diplomat replied, and Elliott was soon ensconced at MI6, Britain’s counterpart to the C.I.A.