The Happy Traitor
SIMON KUPER
(PROFILE BOOKS, 288 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064
George Blake is the least well-known of British double agents, so while this book adds to a very small pile of biographies, it is pitched against the formidable stack devoted to the Cambridge Five. Why is Blake so little-known? As is clear from his 2012 interview with Kuper, his personality was multifaceted and not easy to grasp.
He was a formidable linguist, and he was fluent in French, Dutch, English, German, Russian and Arabic. He was polite, charming, amiable, humorous. His Britishness never ran deep: he was born in the Netherlands to a Jewish Egyptian father, who was a naturalised British citizen (Blake inherited this), and a Protestant Dutch mother. The longest period he ever spent in the UK was the six years of his 42-year sentence in Wormwood Scrubs, from which he escaped in 1966, and subsequently defected.