Word: burgesses
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...well-born and well-off, Cambridge University was an oasis in the wasteland of prewar Europe. Yet, for a few, the green fields were mined with sexual intrigue and high treason. For Cambridge was also a school for scandal. The most notorious Soviet spies were recruited there: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and, it turned out late last year, Sir Anthony Blunt, now deknighted and deposed as art adviser to the Queen. How, from this world of privilege, philosophy and vintage port, could the Soviets have enlisted such consummate traitors...
...most interesting wines are being made by comparatively small estates that have started up in the past two decades. They are owned by engineers and airline pilots, big businessmen and corporations. Most of the bottles shipped by such wineries as Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, Chappellet, Santa Ynez, Burgess, Joseph Swan, Sanford & Benedict, J. Lohr, Keenan, Heitz and Chateau St. Jean are instant sellouts-often at higher prices than comparable French, Italian or German vintages. A tasting...
...Cambridge, Mass., and Cambridge, England, he is reminiscent of Alger Hiss. He mentioned in his apologia that in the '30s he was drawn to Marxism and the U.S.S.R. in the light of Chamberlain's appeasement policy, but went on to admit that it was the influence of Burgess that led him to translate this vague sympathy into active service on behalf of the KGB. I cannot, in any case, see Das Kapital as his bedside book...
More evident than a common grasp of Marxism was the common practice of homosexuality, at least as far as Burgess, Maclean and Blunt were concerned. Here again Philby was different, being an ardent womanizer, though, it would seem, odd in his ways. His third wife, an American lady acquired in Beirut, in her excellent little book The Spy I Loved, describes how he wooed her, which involved sending her a whole series of loving messages written on tiny pieces of tissue paper, with instructions to burn them when read and carefully scatter the ash, or, if that should be inconvenient...
...famous but, as I think, much overrated novelist E.M. Forster, who provided putative traitors with a serviceable formula for justifying their treachery by insisting that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. Burgess fastened eagerly onto this line of thought, but how fraudulent it is! After all, betraying one's country would automatically involve betraying all one's friends who were also fellow countrymen: the two propositions are not alternatives but collateral...