Tracing the early career of the most notorious double agent of the Cold War, Littell provides us with a series of distinct narrative voices and points of view, from a soviet intelligence analyst to recruiter and communist activists in pre-war Austria and a royalist actress in Civil War Spain as Philby embraces this new iteration of the Great Game with aplomb and natural talent. This is a readable, witty, vivid and enthralling portrait on a young man, a well-educated aristocratic scion of a vanishing age of empire, set on a course to shake the world. Littell rounds the whole thing out with a daring twist that should tickle the fancy of any espionage fan, however credible they might find it.