James Klugmann and the Hopes and Fears of British Communism.
James Klugmann and the Hopes and Fears of British Communism will tell the full story for the first time of James Klugmann, who was the leading political inspiration behind the generation of Cambridge communists, including several of the ‘Magnificent Five’ who went on to spy for Russia. Klugmann has appeared in various accounts of the spy ring, but his full role and extraordinary life has never been told before.
The book makes extensive use of recently released archive material, notably Klugmann’s MI5 file, which sheds revealing new light on his life, notably his role in the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, where he has been accused of manipulating intelligence reports to win the allies’ support for Marshall Tito’s communist partisans, and his role in recruiting the ‘fifth man’, John Cairncross in the Cambridge spy networks of the 1930s.
As well as filling an important gap in the existing literature on the Cambridge communist generation, the book challenges conventional portrayals of Klugmann as a Soviet stooge, Stalinist hack, or notorious spy. As the book will argue, a much more complex picture emerges of him as both a humanist communist, and party functionary, whose real and conflicting loyalties, to the British Communist Party, the Soviet Union and his own political morality and conscience, did not prevent him from being an inspiring political educator and intellectual.
This study of James Klugmann provides new historical insight crucial for understanding both the left wing politics of the 1930s and for looking again at the motivations of the Cambridge spy network and in doing so challenges some Cold War and post-Cold War assumptions about this period.
The book will argue that James Klugmann’s life and political commitments helps understand the wider political events which shaped the fortunes of British communism, the anti-fascist popular front of the 1930s, the Cold War tensions, the upheavals of 1956 and 1968, the rise of Eurocommunism and the impact of the industrial strife of the 1970s.
It will also reveal the personal and political torments Klugmann endured throughout his life, conflicts of loyalty which have wider implications for understanding the historically important relationship between intellectuals and communism. It tells the story of how one of the most brilliant communist intellectuals of the 1930s died an intellectually broken man.
Book Author
Geoff Andrews was born in Cardiff in 1961 but has lived most of his life in London. After leaving school at 16, he was offered a place as a mature student at Ruskin College, Oxford, where he was taught by David Selbourne and Raphael Samuel, and competed his studies at University College Cardiff.
He has spent much of the last decade in Italy, writing about the troubled politics and fascinating food of that country. He writes and broadcasts regularly on Italy, and his articles have appeared in the Financial Times, Open Democracy and La Repubblica. His last two books, Not a Normal Country: I...
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