BEING a spy does not involve any special skills. Being a writer helps; being an artist is useful. What matters most is loyalty — to your own country, and sometimes to another above your own.

The history of British espionage is crow­ded with spies with dual loyalties. For ex­­ample, the Cambridge Five, a group of university undergraduates, were recruited by the Soviet NKVD in the 1930s and remained active until the 1950s. In 1951, two of them — Donald Maclean (codename Homer) and Guy Burgess — fled to the Soviet Union, followed in 1963 by a third, Kim Philby.

A year later, a fourth, Sir Anthony Blunt (then Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures), admitted to being a Soviet spy. Queen Elizabeth II was informed but advised to retain him, perhaps because years earlier, her father King George VI in 1945 had used Blunt (a former MI5 agent) in a secret mission in postwar Germany. Blunt was sent to retrieve the correspondence between Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter, the German empress Victoria, in case they fell into unscrupulous hands.

Other unexpected spies included T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), the novelist Graham Greene, Roald Dahl (a writer of children’s books), and the travellers Jan (formerly James) Morris and Nick Danziger. Both Danziger and........

© Dawn