Bøker av Andrew Lownie

Winner of the St Ermin's Intelligence Book of the Year Award. 'One of the great biographies of 2015.' The TimesFully updated edition including recently released information. A Guardian Book of the Year. The Times Best Biography of the Year. Mail on Sunday Biography of the Year. Daily Mail Biography of Year. Spectator Book of the Year. BBC History Book of the Year. 'A remarkable and definitive portrait ' Frederick Forsyth'Andrew Lownie's biography of Guy Burgess, Stalin's Englishman ... shrewd, thorough, revelatory.' William Boyd'In the sad and funny Stalin's Englishman, [Lownie] manages to convey the charm as well as the turpitude.' Craig BrownGuy Burgess was the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.In this first full biography, Andrew Lownie shows us how even Burgess's chaotic personal life of drunken philandering did nothing to stop his penetration and betrayal of the British Intelligence Service. Even when he was under suspicion, the fabled charm which had enabled many close personal relationships with influential Establishment figures (including Winston Churchill) prevented his exposure as a spy for many years.Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally, many of whom have never spoken about him before, and the discovery of hitherto secret files, Stalin's Englishman brilliantly unravels the many lives of Guy Burgess in all their intriguing, chilling, colourful, tragi-comic wonder.

An important biography of an extraordinary, multi-faceted Scot. The name of John Buchan will forever be associated with the classic thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps. He would be remembered as the author of this thriller if he had written nothing else. But he in fact wrote over a hundred books, including a series of 'shockers' - featuring the characters of Richard Hannay, Sandy Arbuthnot and Edward Leithen - along with childrens' books and tales of the supernatural. He also wrote biographies of, among others, Cromwell and Sir Walter Scott. In spite of his prolific output, Buchan did not consider writing his principal activity. A man of formidable energy, he had a distinguished career in public life. He was a member of Milner's famous 'Kindergarten' of brilliant young men in South Africa and later worked as assistant editor for the Spectator, and for the publishing house of Nelsons. He ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and was a Member of Parliament for eight years. Finally, as Lord Tweedsmuir, he was for five years Governor-General of Canada. Although he led an active, at times frenetic, public life, Buchan was at heart a countryman. He was a passionate fisherman, and believed deeply in the redemptive powers of the wild. In this, the first biography of Buchan for many years, Andrew Lownie has been able to draw on private papers not used before, which have enabled him to paint a compelling picture of Buchan's life, and a panoramic view of British political, social, and literary circles during the first half of the twentieth century.Praise for John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier: ʻAndrew Lownie offers a solid and convincing portrait of a complex man and controls the innumerable aspects of Buchan's life in an exemplary manner.' - Times Literary Supplement 'Trumpets should now sound for Buchan; and I will sound one of my own for Andrew Lownie, who has brought this most extraordinary man to life in a way no previous writer has.' - Patrick Cosgrove, Independent 'In his thorough and lucid biography, Andrew Lownie, a Scottish journalist and editor of several collections of Buchan's stories and poetry, sympathetically evokes this 'highly complex and private man who may not always himself have understood his own motivations and abilities.' - New York Times Andrew Lownie was born in 1961 and educated at Fettes, Westminster, Magdalene College Cambridge and Edinburgh University. Like Buchan, he has been a law student, a journalist contributing to the Times and Spectator, a Conservative Parliamentary candidate in Scotland and worked in publishing. A Council Member of the Buchan Society, he has written introductions to several Buchan novels and has edited collections of Buchan's poetry and short stories.