on his shuffling strolls through Moscow and listened to him through the bugs planted in his cheap chandelier.

He was also lonely. A serial monogamist, he sufficiently enjoyed marriage to want to try it for a fourth time. At the age of 58, his eye alighted on Rufina Ivanovna Pukhova, a flame-haired copy editor 20 years his junior.

The couple married at a register office in Moscow in December 1971. It is telling that the only witnesses were Philby’s two KGB case officers.

When these pictures were taken, Mr and Mrs Philby had been married for around eight months. Rufina found much about her husband that was charmingly eccentric – his listening to the BBC, cooking bacon and eggs, drinking tea – but there was a darker side. He would yell out in his sleep, and when he was awake,

On their honeymoon in 1972, the couple chose Siberia, a destination then more often associated with involuntary travel. Philby found trips within the Soviet Union stressful, as his status meant that he always had to meet new people, and it is that sense of unease that permeates these photographs. Is he feigning polite interest in the account he is doubtless being given concerning the erection of the huge dam at Bratsk, an edifice partly constructed by the political prisoners of a regime that he continued to uphold?

And, unlike other holidaymakers, the Philbys were accompanied by a KGB minder, and would be received by a local KGB man wherever they went. The two men to Philby’s left are likely to be Valery and Vitaly, KGB men mentioned in Rufina’s book.

Vitaly was married to a woman Rufina considered a “dragon”, and shortly after the visit to the dam, the Philbys were entertained at their home with coffee and brandy. It emerged that Vitaly’s wife, Valentina, was a leader of the local Young Communist League, who had a booming voice and a bosom to match. Whenever she snapped “Vitaly”, the henpecked KGB man would cower in his chair.

Despite the evident tedium of such duty visits, the trip to Siberia seems to have been a memorable and pleasant one, involving a sojourn on a cruise boat skippered by an eccentric captain, and with the greatest irritant proving to be the midges.

At the end of that summer, the couple returned to Moscow. From that point on, the remaining 16 years of Philby’s life would be beset by alcoholism, bronchitis and depression. It is difficult to feel much sympathy for him.

When one looks at the pictures again, it seems clear that Philby is labouring under a sense of obligation. Rufina later recalled that her husband was fond of saying: “Everything has to be paid for one way or another.”

It is gratifying to think that, for Philby, the cost of treachery was a high one.