When George Blake, a Senior Officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service, was sentenced in 1961 to forty-two years' imprisonment for spying for the KGB, the judge said he had undone most of the work done by British Intelligence since the war. Blake said nothing. When Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison five and a half years later, the British press said it was the escape of the century and that the KGB must have masterminded it. Blake was not around to comment. When some of Blake's fellow prisoners who had helped his escape later wrote books on their role, Blake himself kept silent. Whn spy writers, fascinated by his treachery, pyschoanalaysed the forces which drove him, Blake did not defend himself. Now at last, Blake has decided to speak. Blake describes how he as eventually brought down; recalling his arrest and interrogation, his life in prison, his sensational escape, assisted by Limerick man, Sean Bourke, and his new life in Moscow. George Blake emerges as a most unusual personality, one determined to face the reality of a damaged world, but still coming to terms with the fact that the side he chose was not the communist paradise he had imagined. The book, like its author, will arouse powerful emotions, whether at the end of ti you revile Blake for his calculated treachery, or admire him for being a man who stuck to his beliefs because he says he had no other choice)

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