The Cambridge Spies | Interview | 4
British Scandal
Wondery
4.5 • 6.5K Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2023
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alice and Matt sit down with biographer Andrew Lownie, who spent over 30 years researching Guy Burgess and spoke to over one hundred people who knew him personally. He tells us why Cambridge University was a particularly fertile breeding ground for Soviet recruits, how much damage the spy ring wrought on the British establishment and why five people who knew each other should never have become spies in the first place.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello Prime Members, you can listen to British scandal one week early and ad free on Amazon |
| 0:05.1 | music or via the OneDrew Plus subscription on the OneDrew app or Apple podcasts. |
| 0:22.3 | From OneDrew I'm Alice Levine and I'm Matt Ford and this is British scandal. |
| 0:30.1 | So Matt we've finished the story of the Cambridge spies and it has been an intense one. |
| 0:41.5 | Well it must have been for you, those sessions with the accent coach Carbin Easy. |
| 0:44.7 | Yeah I'm going to put a little ban on non-British accents when it's my week to read I think. |
| 0:49.7 | Yes we've got plenty of accents over on, thank you very much, we don't need other accents. |
| 0:54.5 | If we're running out of accents they'll be all for it. British ones are fine, |
| 0:59.0 | that's almost what I meant. Yeah jokes about you being a big hit aside. |
| 1:03.7 | This story really felt like a parable for the times in which we live because that whole thing |
| 1:08.4 | of just trusting people because of their background feels relevant given the last few years. |
| 1:13.3 | Yeah it's kind of the beauty of the story isn't it? This is a group of men who were as |
| 1:16.5 | establishment as they come blowing the whole thing wide open exposing how ridiculous the blind |
| 1:23.2 | is. Yeah it's really striking the ease with which they navigated the corridors of power |
| 1:28.7 | and the ability to lead double lives. The whole thing just sounds too stressful. |
| 1:32.8 | Oh no it's not for you Matt it's not a lifestyle I can imagine you leading. |
| 1:36.1 | No I mean I struggle just with the one life let alone double or triple. |
| 1:39.2 | I actually can't get my head round it either but do not worry because I guess today spent |
| 1:42.9 | 20 years trying to do just that. Andrew Loney is a literary agent and biographer who wrote Stalin's |
| 1:48.9 | Englishman the lives of Guy Burgess for which he interviewed over a hundred people who knew Guy |
| 1:54.1 | Burgess personally. He's also a friend of the show and he joins us next. |
| 2:03.0 | In a four-part series the Generation Why Podcast unravels the story of Khalif Browder, |
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