The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle

James Klugmann appears as a shadowy figure in the legendary history of the Cambridge spies. As both mentor and friend to Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and others, Klugmann was the man who manipulated promising recruits deemed ripe for conversion to the communist cause. This perception of him was reinforced following the release of his MI5 file and the disclosure of Soviet intelligence files in Moscow, which revealed he played a key part in the recruitment of John Cairncross, the 'fifth man', and had a pivotal war-time role in the Special Operations Executive, helping shift Churchill and the allies to support Tito and the communist partisans in Yugoslavia. In this book, Geoff Andrews reveals Klugmann's story in full for the first time, uncovering the motivations, conflicts and illusions of those drawn into the world of communism - and the sacrifices they made on its behalf.

Table of Contents:
Prologue 1. Hampstead: Bourgeois Beginnings 2. Outsider at Gresham’s 3. A Cambridge Communist 4. Organising the Movement 5. Mentor and Talent Spotter 6. The Making of a Communist Intellectual 7. Working for the Comintern 8. The Professional Revolutionary 9. The Spy Circle 10. The Reluctant Spy 11. A Communist Goes to War 12. Comrade or Conspirator? 13. Great Expectations 14. Cold War Intellectual 15. Trials and Tribulations 16. The Party Functionary: 1956 and After 17. Lost Generation 18. Late Spring 19. Hopes and Fears 20. A Good Jesuit

About the Author :
Geoff Andrews is an historian and biographer who has written widely on the history of political ideas and movements and twentieth century British and Italian politics. He is Senior Lecturer in Politics at The Open University and author of The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle (2015) and Not a Normal Country: Italy After Berlusconi (2005).

Review :
A fascinating study of the intellectual and moral ossification that can result from an addiction to dogma. Geoff Andrews has done his research…well-written and thought-provoking account. Geoff Andrews has done a fine job in piecing together the story. This fascinating biography illuminates the world of the mid-twentieth century Communist intellectuals: the idealism that motivated them, and the choices that they had to make. In his illuminating, sympathetic, but far from sycophantic, biography of Klugmann, a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Geoff Andrews paints a picture of a troubled intellectual who sacrificed his integrity through rigid devotion to the party.