The author of this memoir, Tim Milne, is a friend and close associate of Soviet intelligence agent Kim Philby in MI6, the British secret intelligence service. The book is a frank account of a thirty-seven-year friendship that included ten years of close collaboration and detailed memories of the relationship between two close people, shown from both a personal and political perspective. The portrait of the largest KGB spy, a member of the Cambridge Five - the most powerful intelligence group during the Second World War, essentially a traitor to his country, was nevertheless written without malice and bitterness.