... fascinating, rich and probing ... Mr. Kuper is very good on the range of intellectual and political factors at play in this ... One of the pleasures of this book is that Mr. Kuper makes no effort to play down episodes like this, in which Blake’s espionage had almost no real impact ... a beguiling and endlessly interesting portrait of one man’s rigid, Panglossian desire to see the best in everything ... No matter how hard Mr. Kuper probes, and his questions are consistently good, he meets a wall of relentless positivity. Long ago, you realize, Blake had learned to avoid asking difficult questions, either of himself or of his KGB handlers. In many ways, the beauty of Spies, Lies, and Exile is the manner in which Blake’s wide-eyed credulity is matched, blow for blow, by Mr. Kuper’s considered skepticism and his ability, at the end, to see through the veneer of self-deception.
... 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.
The result isn’t new information — Blake’s description of his life was consistent with previous accounts, which Kuper often quotes — but it is an enjoyable and lively retelling of a story now largely forgotten ... Kuper will be familiar to FT readers as an entertaining and thoughtful writer, and his approach is to try to understand his subject while resisting his charm. Instead of a formula spy yarn, we get a personal encounter with Blake, as Kuper wrestles with his motivations and justifications, asking whether someone who barely knew Britain can really be called a traitor ... Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it may be hard to recall why people like this once mattered so much. But their betrayals were real: as Kuper has to remind himself in the wake of a friendly encounter, at least 40 agents behind the Iron Curtain were killed as a result of information Blake passed to his handlers. In the end, listening to his refusal to acknowledge his part in that, we’re left with the impression that the final person Blake deceived was himself.
... the most comprehensive and insightful biography to date ... The author accepts Blake’s explanation of his conversion to communism — 'on grounds of principle alone' — but this is too easy. Every double agent claims to be serving a higher ideological cause, while usually impelled by a slew of other factors, some of them unconscious.
There are no great revelations here, but this well-written book goes to the heart of the Blake story, one that is much more intriguing and interesting on a personal level than those of Britain’s other notorious spies, including the Cambridge ring ... clear and credible.
Kuper makes clear that Blake’s words were often untrustworthy, though he clearly is somewhat sympathetic to a man whose life did not go as planned ... This well-written and solidly researched biography of a complicated man will resonate with readers who enjoyed Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends or the novels of John le Carré.
... a colorful yet glancing portrait ... Blake's personality and true motivations remain out of reach, and Kuper doesn't shed much light on the thinking behind his exhaustive confession or his life in Moscow after escaping from a British prison in 1966 ... Espionage buffs hoping for insight into this enigmatic spy will be disappointed.
