Francis Bacon: Revelations, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan Matthew Sturgis

Bayswater) and Catherine the Great.

His clandestine eavesdropping makes him sound like a lethal Polonius.

Many SIS agents were betrayed by him, tortured and killed. Elaborate and costly operations in Berlin were ruined. He did great damage to SIS, and abetted postStalinist Russia in its international crimes.

Sprung from Wormwood Scrubs by a boozy Irish scamp in 1966, he was driven to Berlin hidden in a false compartment of a Dormobile. In Moscow, he was no longer trusted by Soviet spymasters, who wondered if he’d been turned and sprung by the British.

The Happy Traitor is informative, lively and enjoyable. It goes wrong in some facts and interpretations. But it gives the most reasonable and convincing account of George Blake’s motives, activities, repercussions and character we are likely to have for a generation.

Richard Davenport-hines wrote Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain