Although a quarter of the book is devoted to the Cambridge ring, and although it tells much that is new on what Philby, Burgess and Maclean actually told Moscow, opportunities are missed. In 1939 Burgess reported to Moscow that British government policy was to work with Germany wherever possible and ultimately against the Soviet Union. Britain felt that it could easily win a war against Hitler and therefore had no need to conclude a defensive pact with the Soviet Union, even though it was conducting negotiations with Moscow: ‘the opinion is that we have never intended to conclude a serious military pact’ with the Russians. If Burgess’s report is accurate, it gives a new dimension to the subsequent Nazi-Soviet Pact. Yet the authors devote less than a page to the subject.

Instead we have seemingly endless, boring pages about German political groups in the mid-Thirties, a Who Was Who among the Fascists, anti-Fascists, Social Democrats, trade-unionists, underground groups, Communists, and Soviet espionage rings. Or am I prejudiced? Judge for yourself:

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" It was through the Harnacks that Schultze-Boysen established contact with the author and playwright Adam Kuckhoff. His wife Greta had been another German student at Wisconsin University and Kuckhoff was the leader of another anti-Fascist circle identifying itself as ‘Creative Intelligentsia’. Through Harnack’s cousin they also established links with the Social Democrat secret opposition to Hitler led by Karl Goerdeler, the former Mayor of Leipzig who was to be executed for his part in the July 1944 plot against Hitler. Another member of Kuckhoff’s circle was Adolf Grimme, a leading Social Democrat and associate of the trade-unionist named Wilhelm Leischner, whose own underground opposition group included Berlin’s Polizei-Präsident Graf Wolf von Helldorf, who had assembled a damaging dossier on the Nazi leadership ... [Goering] was a guest of honour at Lieutenant Schultze-Boysen’s 1936 wedding, when he married Libertas, the grand-daughter of Count Oldenburg und Hertfeld, who had been a close friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
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