Like most Englishmen of my recent acquaintance—at the Grand Hôtel and the Villa Mauresque—Guy Burgess spoke with a plummy, nasal voice that seemed to contain a slight speech impediment, although that might just as easily have been the effect of too much alcohol. What else is there to do on a three-day voyage to Leningrad but get drunk? Suave, reptilian, and dripping with disdain, as if the whole business of being debriefed by his Russian handlers were beneath him, the voice reminded me of an English movie actor I’d once seen called Henry Daniell, who had seemed to me to be the screen personification of the sardonic, well-bred villain. As I listened to Burgess, it was as if the man were with us in Maugham’s drawing room, searching his memory and perhaps his conscience for the best interpretation of his actions—indeed, he seemed every bit as mannered as Somerset Maugham and as full of whinging self-justification as the great writer’s nephew. The recording was a good one, and occasionally, in the silences, you could even hear the dull, rhythmic throb of what might have been the ship’s engines but could as easily have been the slow breathing of some unseen leviathan.

“My name is Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess and I was born in Devonport, England, on the sixteenth of April nineteen eleven. For the purposes of verification, in nineteen forty-four I was running a Swiss source for MI5, code named Orange, who, I’m afraid to say, met with a sticky end in Trier. MI5 is, of course, Britain’s domestic secret intelligence service. My father was a naval officer and I myself attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth before going on to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge.