Michael Dobbs on Guy Burgess

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michael Dobbs champions the life of Guy Burgess - journalist, diplomat and spy. Between 1935 and 1951, Guy Burgess worked for a Conservative MP, the BBC, MI6 and the Foreign Office. Brilliant, flamboyant and apparently shambolic, he also shot like an arrow to the heart of the Establishment and secretly and systematically betrayed its secrets to the KGB. Matthew Parris chairs as Michael explains why he believes that Guy Burgess was a Great Life. Burgess’s biographer Stewart Purvis, who uncovered the only known audio recording of Guy Burgess, is the expert witness. Producer: Julia Johnson First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2015.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Once you've wrapped up this podcast, how about trying a very British cult?
0:06.0	What happens if the person you trust with your future isn't what you think they are?
0:10.0	I did feel the whole time he was watching me Yeti. I saw a footprint and that really gave me gusmas.
0:16.4	Or people who knew me. Emme, I remember every secret, every lie. I'm the only one who knows the truth.
0:23.0	Discover more of our biggest podcast from 2003.
0:27.0	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:29.0	Great Lives is a download from Radio 4.
0:32.0	We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.
0:36.0	My guest this week is Michael Dobbs, now Lord Dobbs, a former chief of staff and a deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, Michael followed a career in politics,
0:45.4	broadcasting and journalism and is best known as the writer of House of Cards, the political
0:51.0	thriller which brought Ian Richardson's treacherous
0:53.7	Francis Urquhart to our TV screens.
0:56.2	It's now been adapted for America where it stars Kevin Spacey.
0:59.8	Michael seems to have a panchon for lionizing rogues because his choice of great life, another
1:07.1	man who spent his career in Westminster, Whitehall and the BBC, was at least a traitor, whose life has been endlessly examined, but very rarely celebrated.
1:18.0	Let's leave his identity, as it were, under cover for a second as he would have enjoyed,
1:23.0	and let it emerge from some of those who knew him very well.
1:27.0	He could spruce himself up and go to a cocktail party
1:30.0	and look extremely smart, but he named him would relapse and look more like the eccentric
1:34.7	dawn you know what I mean the dirty dawn he had filthy habits his office was
1:39.7	always very very dirty despair of his secretaries.
1:43.0	He was very, very gregarious.
	...

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