Kim philby autobiography

Treachery is the subject of My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy, the 1968 memoir of Kim Philby, the double agent who headed the Cambridge Five spy ring.
Written from Moscow in 1967, My Silent War shook the world and introduced a new archetype in fiction: the unrepentant spy.
This is the British hardback first edition of My Silent War, Cambridge spy Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby's autobiography, published by.

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Daniel Paul O'Donnell

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Calm, Slippery, and sadistic: My Silent War by Kim Philby and A Spy among Friends by Ben MacIntyre

A tale of two books

Originally, this was going to be a discussion of My Silent War. But when I finished it the first time, I felt very conflicted by the book: an interesting read, intriguing, but also somewhat suspicious.

I knew the story of Kim Philby going back to the 1970s — my father was fascinated by him and all the Cambridge spies, for various kinds of class reasons (social, academic, disciplinary). I had also read various books and stories about him over the years, most recently Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy among Friends. But the ~~novel~~ autobiography was somehow not what I expected. Calmer than I thought. More slippery. Sadistic. I simply didn’t know what to make of it.

With friends (and enemies) like these…

An indication of the problem is found among the cover blurbs. In most books these are either laudatory or, at worst, mock critical (I’m thinking of books I̵

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In the annals of espionage, one name towers above all others: that of H. A. R. "Kim" Philby, the ringleader of the legendary Cambridge spies.

A member of the British establishment, Philby joined the Secret Intelligence Service in 1940, rose to the head of Soviet counterintelligence, and, as M16's liaison with the CIA and the FBI, betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians, fatally compromising covert actions to roll back the Iron Curtain in the early years of the Cold War.

Written from Moscow in 1967, My Silent War shook the world and introduced a new archetype in fiction: the unrepentant spy. It inspired John Le Carre's Smiley novels and the later espionage novels of Graham Greene. Kim Philby was history's most successful spy. He was also an exceptional writer who gave us the great iconic story of the Cold War and revolutionized, in the process, the art of espionage writing.

The best true spy story ... a superbly cynical combination of truth, half-truth, falsehood and propaganda

...teeming with real-life tales of intrigue and espionage

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Trawling through the charity shops of Lewes, Brighton and Sussex for top flight first editions – something I do, as this blog attests, on a regular basis – tends to be a fairly fruitless exercise. By and large what you turn up are relatively recent books, the true gems proving few and far between. But every now and then a real find presents itself, and such was the case with this book, bought in the Brighton branch of Oxfam Books for £6.99:

This is the British hardback first edition of My Silent War, Cambridge spy Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby's autobiography, published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1968 under a dustjacket designed by Michael Jarvis. Crucially, however, it's also the first impression, which makes it really rather special: most of the copies listed for sale on AbeBooksare later impressions, in which two catty references to Lady Kelly, wife of Sir David Kelly, British Ambassador to Turkey and then the USSR, have been removed (the 1968 US Grove Press edition retains the references); among other disparaging remarks, Philby describes Lady Kelly a