The story of the ring of spies known as the Cambridge Five, who infiltrated the highest levels of the British establishment and helped Stalin cement a half century of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe.
Senior wants to draw attention...to the hideous damage these men inflicted ... Senior highlights the Cambridge spies’ hypocrisy and malevolence whenever she can — a hostile approach that’s justified, if occasionally repetitive. Sometimes she dials up the charges before having to walk bits of them back ... But the narrative picks up pace in the last third, after the war ends, when defectors from the Soviet Union threaten to blow the Apostles’ covers. The story moves briskly, as the spies play a hair-raising game of trying to serve their masters in Moscow while the walls start closing in.
Senior’s comprehensive account of perhaps the 20th century’s most famous spy ring focuses above all on the human cost of their betrayals ... Senior – a writer of historical fiction, a podcaster, and a book critic for The Times of London – acknowledges the appeal of communist idealism in Depression-era Britain ... But Stalin’s Apostles is not a sympathetic account ... Stalin’s Apostles offers a lively – if polemical – account of Stalin’s consolidation of a vast Soviet empire, and how a fire hose of secrets from the Cambridge Five aided his maneuvering.
A soup-to-nuts history of the Cambridge spies that is as good as anything I have read ... What marks it out, quite apart from its lively prose and absorbing pace, is the contempt in which the author holds her protagonists ... Senior’s magnificent book will consign such romantic notions to the dustbin of history. The truth about the Cambridge spies is now plain for all to see: they were monsters.
