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Enemies Within: Communists, Spies and the Making of Modern Britain cover art

Enemies Within: Communists, Spies and the Making of Modern Britain

By: Richard Davenport-Hines
Narrated by: Richard Trinder
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Publisher's Summary

What pushed Blunt, Burgess, Cairncross, Maclean and Philby into Soviet hands?
With access to recently released papers and other neglected documents, this sharp analysis of the intelligence world examines how and why these men and others betrayed their country and what this cost Britain and its allies.

'Historians fumble their catches when they study individuals' motives and ideas rather than the institutions in which people work, respond, find motivation and develop their ideas', writes Richard Davenport-Hines in his history of the men who were persuaded by the Soviet Union to betray their country.

In an audiobook which attempts to counter many contradictory accounts, Enemies Within offers a study of character: both individual and institutional - the operative traits of boarding schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Intelligence Division, the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6 and Moscow Centre.

The audiobook refuses to present the Cambridge spies as they wished to be seen, in Marxist terms. It argues that these five men did their greatest harm to Britain not from their clandestine espionage but in their propaganda victories enjoyed from Moscow after 1951. Notions of trust, abused trust, forfeited trust and mistrust from the late 19th century to perestroika pepper its narrative.

In an audiobook that is as intellectually thrilling as it is entertaining and illuminating, Davenport-Hines charts how the undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise, and the suspicion of educational advantages began with the Cambridge Five and has transformed the social and political temper of Britain.

©2017 Richard Davenport-Hines (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
Historical Espionage Great Britain Russia
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Critic Reviews

"Succinct, lively and well-written biography...Done with great panache, in a volume that will introduce Keynes and his strange world to a new generation of readers." ( Evening Standard)
"An amusing, elegant and provocative writer ...great fun. By focusing on Keynes as a private man and public figure rather than an academic economist, it is possible to see him as the last and greatest flowering of Edwardian Liberalism." ( Sunday Times)
"Daringly but sensibly, this renowned biographer, Davenport-Hines, has studied Keynes from seven points of view - not one of them as an economist...a rewarding and fascinating book." ( Daily Mail)

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Profile Image for Robyn

Misleading book cover

If your main interest is the Cambridge Five depicted on the book cover and specifically mentioned in the book summary presented here, this is not the book for you. The Cambridge Five don't even get a mention until Chapter 8. I listened for 16 hours (couldn't face the remaining 8) and the Five are just a few among a number of spies and a sea of names in UK and US intelligence and government. Obviously Richard Davenport-Hines has done a huge amount of research and his version of 'the making of modern Britain' may be an impressive work, but it was not what I expected. The only positive I got from this purchase was a reminder of what we all know - don't judge a book by its cover.

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Profile Image for ELIZABETH

Too Much

If you want a complete history of spies and spying in the UK then you might enjoy this book. For me, the first part was pretty dreary, partly due to amount of unnecessary detail Davenport-Hines insists on including. It's as if he has done all this research and cannot bear to waste any of it. It certainly gets more interesting once the author considers the Cambridge spies and gives an alternative point of view to the commonly held belief that during and after the war the secret services were run by incompetents using the old-boy network. However, the intensity with which the author belabours his arguments and rants on about Russian propaganda and the British Labour Party increases to such a pitch you can just imagine him frothing at the mouth. Not for anyone who enjoys reading John Le Carre's version of events.

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