A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

by Ben Macintyre

ideological conflict: Hitler had taken power in 1933; the Spanish Civil War would erupt in the summer of 1936; extreme right and extreme left fought it out in university rooms and on the streets. But the fervid political atmosphere simply passed Elliott by. He was far too busy having fun. He seldom opened a book and emerged after three years with many friends and a third-class degree, a result he considered ‘a triumph over the examiners’. Nicholas Elliott left Cambridge with every social and educational advantage, and absolutely no idea what he wanted to do. But beneath a complacent and conventional exterior, and the ‘languid, upper-class manner’ lay a more complex personality, an adventurer with a streak of subversion. Claude Elliott’s Victorian rigidity had instilled in his son a deep aversion to rules. ‘I could never be a good soldier because I am insufficiently amenable to discipline,’ he reflected. When told to do something, he tended to ‘obey not the order which he had actually been given by a superior, but rather the order which that superior would have given if he had known what he was talking about’. He was tough – the brutality of Durnford had seen to that – but also sensitive, bruised by a lonely childhood.