Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal: A Spy Among Friends

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKA WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOKENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S BEST SPY BOOK OF 2014A SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2014"A crisply written tale of a classic intelligence case that remains relevant more than 50 years later." —USA Today "A Spy Among Friends is a rollicking book. Mr. Macintyre is full of pep and never falters in the headlong rush of his narrative." —Wall Street Journal "Shrewdly written and highly readable." —National Post “Macintyre has produced more than just a spy story. He has written a narrative about that most complex of topics, friendship. . . . When devouring this thriller, I had to keep reminding myself it was not a novel. It reads like a story by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, or John le Carré, leavened with a dollop of P. G. Wodehouse. . . . [Macintyre] takes a fresh look at the grandest espionage drama of our era.” —Walter Isaacson, New York Times Book Review“A Spy Among Friends is the latest in Ben Macintyre’s series on twentieth-century espionage. All are superb, and A Spy Among Friends is no exception. Macintyre gives the familiar story of Philby new life.” —Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker“Macintyre does here what he does best—tell a heck of a good story. A Spy Among Friends is hands down the most entertaining book I’ve reviewed this year.” —Boston Globe“By now, the story of British double agent Harold ‘Kim’ Philby may be the most familiar spy yarn ever, fodder for whole libraries of histories, personal memoirs and novels. But Ben Macintyre manages to retell it in a way that makes Philby’s destructive genius fresh and horridly fascinating.” —Washington Post“Vivid and fascinating . . . [Macintyre] succeeds admirably.” —Newsday“[Macintyre] deserves full credit for delivering this complex, continent-hopping tale with clarity. . . . The result is, in every sense, a class act.” —Entertainment Weekly“Excellent . . . I was thoroughly engrossed in this book, beginning to end. It has all the suspense of a good spy novel, and its characters are a complex mix of charm, eccentricity, intelligence, and wit. And it offers a great—and mostly troubling—insight into the behind-the-scenes workings of those we entrust with the most important of our political and military secrets.” —Huffington Post“Riveting . . . Mr. Macintyre [is] a shrewd and masterful chronicler.” —Washington Times“Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller, concentrating on Philby’s friendship with and betrayal of Elliott and of Angleton, his pathetically dedicated admirer at the top of the CIA. Macintyre’s account of the verbal duel between Elliott and Philby in their final confrontation in Beirut in 1963 is worthy of John le Carré at his best.” —The Guardian