
- 290 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Capital punishment was abolished for murder in Great Britain in 1969, but remained as the punishment for high treason until as recently as 1998, demonstrating how seriously we take the crime of betraying your country. But even with the threat of the noose hanging over them, many still chose the path of treachery during the cataclysmic events of last century.
British Traitors examines the lives and motivations of a number of the perpetrators of this most heinous of crimes, following the footsteps of Fascist traitors such as William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) and John Amery to the gallows, investigating what drove men such as Wilfred Macartney and John Herbert King to betray their country during the war to end all wars and delving into the mysterious web of espionage and subterfuge surrounding the Cambridge Spy Ring that spied for the Soviet Union from the nineteen-thirties until the early nineteen-fifties.
People commit treason for many reasons - some seek adventure, some seek reward, some are motivated by political philosophy, while others are sucked into it by their own foolishness. British Traitors provides a fascinating look at the lives and impulses of those who chose to betray their country.
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Information
Table of contents
- Glossary & Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Communist Spies of the 1920s and 1930s
- Wilfred Macartney: The Man Who Never Told the Truth
- John Herbert King: The Spy Who Didn’t Exist
- ‘Dave’ Springhall: A Political Animal
- The Second World War
- William Joyce: ‘Lord Haw-Haw’
- John Amery: A Difficult Young Man
- George Armstrong: A Traitor Alone
- Duncan Scott-Ford: The Traitor Who Died for Love
- Theodore Schurch: A Gullible Traitor
- The Cambridge Spies
- Guy Burgess: ‘The Genius in the Network’
- Donald Maclean: The Spy Named ‘Homer’
- Kim Philby: The True Believer
- Anthony Blunt: The Spy with No Shame
- John Cairncross: The Fifth Man
- Cold War Traitors
- Alan Nunn May: The Nondescript Traitor
- Klaus Fuchs: The Traitor Who Gave the Russians the Bomb
- Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee: When Harry Met Ethel
- George Blake: ‘A Soldier in the Cold War’
- John Vassall: The Dandy Clerk Who Became a Traitor
- Michael Bettaney: The Traitor the Russians Ignored
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Copyright