BEN MACINTYRE is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, The Napoleon of Crime, and Forgotten Fatherland, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of the wartime espionage trilogy.
New York Times Bestseller New York Times Book Review Notable Book
An Amazon Best Book of the Year Washington Post Notable Book
Entertainment Weekly's Best Spy Book of 2014 "Macintyre has
produced more than just a spy story. He has written a narrative
about that most complex of topics, friendship...When devouring this
thriller, I had to keep reminding myself it was not a novel. It
reads like a story by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, or John Le Carré,
leavened with a dollop of P.G. Wodehouse...[Macintyre] takes a
fresh look at the grandest espionage drama of our era."--Walter
Isaacson, New York Times Book Review "Superb... Riveting reading."
-Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker "Macintyre does here what he does
best -- tell a heck of a good story. A Spy Among Friends is hands
down the most entertaining book I've reviewed this year." --Boston
Globe "Macintyre is a superb writer, with an eye for the telling
detail as fine as any novelist's...A Spy Among Friends is as
suspenseful as any novel, too, as the clues tighten around Philby's
guilt."--Dallas Morning News "By now, the story of British double
agent Harold 'Kim' Philby may be the most familiar spy yarn ever,
fodder for whole libraries of histories, personal memoirs and
novels. But Ben Macintyre manages to retell it in a way that makes
Philby's destructive genius fresh and horridly fascinating."--David
Ignatius, Washington Post
"A Spy Among Friends is a rollicking book. Mr. Macintyre is full of
pep and never falters in the headlong rush of his narrative."--Wall
Street Journal "Vivid and fascinating...[Macintyre] succeeds
admirably."--Newsday "A crisply written tale of a classic
intelligence case that remains relevant more than 50 years
later."--USA Today
"Excellent...I was thoroughly engrossed in this book, beginning to
end. It has all the suspense of a good spy novel, and its
characters are a complex mix of charm, eccentricity, intelligence
and wit. And it offers a great--and mostly troubling--insight into
the behind-the-scenes workings of those we entrust with the most
important of our political and military secrets."--The Huffington
Post "Working with colorful characters and an anything-can-happen
attitude, Macintyre builds up a picture of an intelligence
community chock-full of intrigue and betrayal, in which Philby was
the undisputed king of lies...Entertaining and lively, Macintyre's
account makes the best fictional thrillers seem tame." --Publishers
Weekly [starred] "Gripping and as well-crafted as an episode of
Smiley's People, full of cynical inevitability, secrets, lashings
of whiskey and corpses." --Kirkus Reviews [starred] "Ben Macintyre
(Double Cross) offers a fresh look at master double agent Kim
Philby...Fans of James Bond will enjoy this look into the era that
inspired Ian Fleming's novels, but any suspense-loving student of
human nature will be shocked and thrilled by this true narrative of
deceit."--Shelf Awareness [starred] "Ben Macintyre has a knack for
finding the most fascinating storylines in history. He has done it
again, with this spellbinding tale of espionage, friendship, and
betrayal. Written with an historian's fidelity to fact and a
novelist's eye for character, A Spy Among Friends is one terrific
book." --David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost
City of Z "Ben Macintyre is one of the most gifted espionage
writers around. In A Spy Among Friends he weaves an absorbing tale
of deceit and duplicity, of treason and betrayal. With exquisite
detail and masterful control, Macintyre unveils the dark and
treacherous interior worlds in which spies live." --Annie Jacobsen,
author of Area 51 and Operation Paperclip
"In this spellbinding account of friendship and betrayal, Ben
Macintyre masterfully describes how the Cambridge-educated Kim
Philby evaded justice by exploiting the incestuous snobbery of the
British old-boy network, which refused to believe that one of its
own could be a major Soviet spy. As riveting as Macintyre's earlier
books were, this searing portrait of Britain's ruling class is even
better." --Lynne Olson, bestselling author of Citizens of London
and Those Angry Days "Ben Macintyre has written a truly fabulous
book about the "fabulous" Kim Philby--the suave, dedicated, and
most intriguing spy of the entire Cold War era. Philby and his
colorful Cambridge comrades are endlessly fascinating. But
Macintyre tells the devastating story in an entirely new fashion,
with new sources and an astonishing intimacy."
--Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and author of The
Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames "I have seldom had a
better read than A Spy Among Friends. It reads like a thriller, a
thriller of a peculiarly intricate and at times frightening sort,
but you just can't stop reading it." --Lady Antonia Fraser, author
of Marie Antoinette: The Journey "The Philby story has been told
many times, but never with such sensitivity. Almost inadvertently,
Ben Macintyre, a Times columnist, provides a devastating critique
of the British class system and the disasters that result when
people assume they know people... A Spy Among Friends is an
extraordinary book about a sordid profession in which the most
important attribute is the ability to lie.... Macintyre's focus on
friendship brings an intimacy to this book that is missing from the
cardboard stereotypes that populate spy novels and conventional
espionage histories...I'm not a lover of spy novels, yet I adored
this book." -The Times of London "Macintyre writes with the
diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born
storyteller, concentrating on Philby's friendship with and betrayal
of Elliott and of Angleton, his pathetically dedicated admirer at
the top of the CIA. Macintyre's account of the verbal duel between
Elliott and Philby in their final confrontation in Beirut in 1963
is worthy of John le Carré at his best."-The Guardian "A Spy Among
Friends, a classic spookfest, is also a brilliant reconciliation of
history and entertainment...An unputdownable postwar thriller whose
every incredible detail is fact not fiction...[a] spellbinding
narrative...Part of the archetypal grip this story holds for the
reader is as a case study in the existential truth that, in human
relations, the Other is never really knowable. For both, the mask
became indistinguishable from reality...A Spy Among Friends is not
just an elegy, it is an unforgettable requiem." -The Observer "Ben
Macintyre's bottomlessly fascinating new book is an exploration of
Kim Philby's friendships, particularly with Nicholas Elliott...
Other books on Philby may have left one with a feeling of grudging
respect, but A Spy Among Friends draws out his icy cold
heart...This book consists of 300 pages; I would have been happy
had it been three times as long." -The Mail on Sunday
"Such a summary does no justice to Macintyre's marvellously shrewd
and detailed account of Philby's nefarious career. It is both
authoritative and enthralling... The book is all the more
intriguing because it carries an afterward by John le Carré." -The
New Statesman "No one writes about deceit and subterfuge so
dramatically, authoritatively or perceptively [as Ben Macintyre].
To read A Spy Among Friends is a bit like climbing aboard a runaway
train in terms of speed and excitement-except that Macintyre knows
exactly where he is going and is in total control of his material."
-The Daily Mail "Philby's story has been told many times
before-both in biography and most notably in John le Carre's
fictional masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy-but never in such
exhaustive detail and with such panache as in Ben MacIntyre's
brilliant, compulsive A Spy Among Friends... Reads like fiction,
which is testament to the extraordinary power of the story itself
but also to the skills of the storyteller...One of the best
real-life spy stories one is ever likely to read." -The Express
"Ben Macintyre has written an engaging book on a tantalising and
ultimately tragic subject. If it starts as a study of friendship,
it ends as an indictment." -The Spectator From the Hardcover
edition.
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