BURGESS GUY: (1911-1963) British diplomat and Soviet Agent, a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era. A rare book signed, being a hardback edition of Classics and Commercials - A Literary Chronicle of the Forties by Edmund Wilson, second impression published by W. H. Allen, London, February 1952, bearing the ownership signature ('Jim Eliot') of Burgess, using his pseudonym, in bold pencil to the front free endpaper. Also bearing the bookplate of Kim Philby (1912-1988) British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. The slim oblong 12mo bookplate features Philby's name ('H. A. R. PHILBY') within a decorative border and is neatly affixed to the front pastedown. Bound in the publisher's blue cloth with title to spine and with a small Foyles bookshop sticker affixed to the lower left corner of the front pastedown. Lacking the dust jacket. An interesting association copy bearing the rare signature of Burgess. Some fading to the spine and boards and with some light overall age wear, G

 

It was Harold Adrian Russell 'Kim' Philby who, in 1935, recommended to Soviet Intelligence that they recruit Guy Burgess as an agent. Philby was also responsible for tipping off Burgess (and the spy Donald Maclean) that they were under suspicion of espionage, prompting them to defect and flee to Moscow in May 1951.

 

In the biography Guy Burgess - The Spy who knew Everyone the authors Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert write that Burgess adopted a pseudonym in order to prevent a wider knowledge of his whereabouts in Moscow, explaining 'He gave himself the first name Jim, after Jim Lees, the former miner who'd been at Trinity with him. The surname he adopted was Eliot, apparently after the female author of Middlemarch known as George Eliot. To fit with the Russian style of having a patronymic as a middle name, he should have Russianised his father's name Malcolm, but it was easier to use a character from War and Peace, Andrei, and use Andreyvitch instead. Thus Guy Burgess was also 'Jim Andreyvitch Eliot', sometimes Elliot and even Elliott'.