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Cambridge, Right or Wrong
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12929 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1987 |
3,941 Words |
| Author
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Dennis O'Keeffe
Dennis O'Keeffe is senior lecturer in sociology of education
at the University of North London. |
THE RED AND THE BLUE
Cambridge, Treason and Intelligence
Andrew Sinclair
Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1986
179 pp., $17.95
THE CAMBRIDGE APOSTLES
Richard Deacon
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986
214 pp., $19.95
To what extent should human beings venerate intellectual distinction? It is a fair guess that most people - at least most Anglo-Saxons - do not. The opulent businessman and the glamorous film star, by contrast, are widely adulated in the United States and Great Britain. When persons with great intellectual gifts are famous, it tends to be because of their political activities or eccentricities rather than their scholarly accomplishments. Bertrand Russell is an obvious case in point. In his native England he is remembered mostly for his work in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. His philosophical and mathematical contributions are a closed shop to most Britons, who would be hard put indeed to name a single Nobel Prize winner, British or otherwise, in science or the arts.
Andrew Sinclair's new book deals with the notorious espionage of top British academics at Cambridge since the 1930s, and Richard Deacon's study concerns the Cambridge University elite in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Intertwined, they tell a story of glittering intellectual achievement, self-destructive vanity, and moral confusion.
Sinclair's book is one that no British patriot could read without feeling dismay and anger. Since the 1950s Britain, and indeed the whole free world, has been rocked by revelations of treason high in the British establishment, beginning with the 1951 defection of foreign service veterans Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to Russia. Of course, not all of Great Britain's traitors have been upper class, or even British-born. The obscure physicist Allan Nunn May, for example, received ten years in prison for passing secrets to the Soviets when he was doing atomic research in Canada. The scientist Klaus Fuchs was also imprisoned for passing invaluable information to the Russians; another atomic physicist, Bruno Pontecorvo, defected to the East as well. All this happened before any British upper-class complicity was publicly known. Inevitably, however, as the story unfolded, the
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