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fer AE Bt ee ‘ This, you can have no doutg, ig the real world which prq- ced what may be called rgess-Maclean situation. I do not think that Mr. Dri- berg has told quite the entire story—not, at least, so far as , Maciean is concerned—but the fact ‘is irrevelant to all except ose who are shouting about ' ying to “get the dirt” veryone, What he brilliantly does to present. Guy Burge: against that background of Eng- lish life which, by a tragi- fateical process that is nearly Shikespearian in its blend of the noble and the absurd, is therefore totally convincing as a picture of a background, even when you have made allowance for the fact that some questions are still unanswered. That is the essential value of what, if we may wheel on a cliché, can truly be called “a document of our times.” ME Driberg has the ability to let the times speak for themselves, I my- self, for instance, do not agree with his theses and interpretations, but one of the reasons why this book is going toybe “ must reading” for any- on interested in the politics people of our age is that the uthentic background of the Burpess-Maclean situation is for one is naturally longing to hegr. 1. first time depicted for all to view and ponder upon. Ht is a remarkable, even} a tremendous, achievement. Tfe- mendous [ mean—speaking one newspaperman to another— in that in this brief story Mr. Driberg succeeds not only in evoking the significant flavour of the "thirties and ‘forties and! early ‘fifties, but also in pro- ducing some “news points” about what really bappened at the decisive moment when the ! policies of the British Govern- ment were making the German- Sovict Pact inevitable. He points out, with.a studied casualnoss which underlines the, ensational character of his naterial, that most of it— the aterial. that is, on the political tuation in 1939-—has becn phib- lished before, in the form jof official translations of captufed German archives, but whs scarcely noticed at the time of publication because it did not fit in very well to the overall § ‘pattern of the cold wa I have insisted —perhaps over- insisted —on the background painting which Mr. Driberg does, partly because he does it adinirably, partly because he himself makes clear that na one can begin to understand the final, rip-roaring cops -and- robbers climax of the Burgess: , Maclean story without studying that background. But it would be unfair to Mr. Driberg to give the impres- sion—if I have given. any such impression-—that this is all back- ground, without the “ hot ne ; about the actual escape of Bhr- gess and Maclean which evefy- Not at all. The round-hy- rdund account of what—as Gey Bbrgess sees it—really happen is|all there. There for the first time. this is just one man’s off-the-cuff opinion—that in a natural and highly respectable disgust at the way the British press hounded these two men, Mr. Driberg leans over back- wards in the other direction. IT don’t, for instance, agree with—a]though I think he makes a very good and hard-to-argue- with case—his view that homo- sexuality was an entirely irreve- lant factor. By which F emphatically do not mean—as the press tried to suppest at the time—that it was a decisive factor, The things that Burgess saw as he looked Ra AS aay SR ee at British life from Eton to Bevin to Eden were in them- selves quite enough to produce the situation which finally sent him to Moscow, role than Mr. Driberg ailows it. But, after all criticism has been made, what we have here is an indispensable contribution to the history of our times. And fhatever else you may | Out our times, you canaot uhless. you are half-palsied, da@ny _tHat they are interesting. on, a THINK myself — and" * But I still ... think that homosexuality played =. a bigger—and more relevant— —