![]() ![]() ![]() One volume from the pile is Ben Macintyre’s 2014 A Spy Among Friends, recently adapted into a television miniseries with Guy Pearce as Philby, Damian Lewis as his longtime friend and colleague Nicholas Elliot, and Stephen Kunken as James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence leader who ended his days as a stark-raving paranoid maniac, insisting that the United Nations building in New York was a secret citadel of Kremlin power. What is it about Harold “Kim” Philby and his comrades in the Cambridge Five, the cell of upper-collegiate Commies who infiltrated the British intelligence services from the interwar years until the mid-Sixties, that continues to enchant and fascinate so many on both sides of the Atlantic? Almost as soon as they had defected to Moscow, popular media began obsessing over their story, be it fictitiously (most notably John Le Carré’s classic George Smiley novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a ripping good yarn no matter your politics) or otherwise (there is a small mountain of biographical and historical volumes that recount the story from almost every angle). ![]()
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