Book of the week: The Happy Traitor by Simon Kuper

Kuper tells the story of the ‘least known but the most damaging of all the British double agents’

The Happy Traitor by Simon Kuper

George Blake, the subject of The Happy Traitor, was the “least known but the most damaging of all the British double agents”, said Ben Macintyre in The Times. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he “betrayed more agents to the Soviet Union” than all the Cambridge spies combined. Unmasked in 1961, he was sentenced to 42 years in prison – then the longest sentence ever handed out in Britain. In 1966, he escaped from Wormwood Scrubs and fled to Moscow, where he died last month at the age of 98. So “remarkable” was his life that Alfred Hitchcock planned to make a film about it – but died before he got the chance. Now Simon Kuper’s “comprehensive and insightful biography”, embargoed until Blake’s death, fleshes out this “shadowy figure”.

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