PositiveThe Times (UK)Very sad ... This book as it stands sometimes feels like a palimpsest, a reconstruction of the memoir he would have written had he lived in health and liberty.
Simon Kuper
RaveThe Spectator (UK)... wise, engaging ... Refreshingly for a writer on espionage, Kuper resists the temptation to big up his subject, and freely admits that in the grand scheme of things Blake’s espionage career didn’t make much difference — except to the lives of the men he betrayed ... Kuper’s highly readable and multi-layered portrait is largely sympathetic, yet clear-eyed about the human cost of moral stances.
Helen Rappaport
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review'I sit high and see far' is the appropriate Russian aphorism. That outsider’s long view is the book’s strength. After all, these foreigners often have more privileged access to great men and events than the vast majority of Russian witnesses ... Rappaport has unearthed plenty of wonderful new material, including the unpublished memoir of Leighton Rogers, discovered in the Library of Congress. Yet there are some odd omissions ... By confining herself to foreigners in Russia’s capital, Rappaport takes a necessarily narrow slice of revolutionary history. But the story these witnesses tell is endlessly fascinating.
