Since their dramatic departure for Moscow in May 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean have excited as much public interest and made more newspaper headlines than any of the most illustrious of their contemporaries. Most of what has been said or written about them so far has been based on mere speculation - but in August this year Tom Driberg went to Russia and put got the inside story for the first time. Fleet Street has hailed his achievement as a "world scoop". Guy Burgess gave him his own account of the fantastic events which led to his becoming one of the "missing diplomats": his motives, the mechanics of his and Maclean's journey, his reception in Russia, and his life five years after.

Driberg had known Burgess when he worked for the BBC and wrote to him suggesting the visit and the book. To his surprise, the proposal was accepted: for a month he lived in Moscow and saw Burgess alone almost daily. He talked to him frankly and freely and got his answers to the questions that have been the subject of world-wide speculation for more than five years.

A successful journalist, a former Labour M.P., and a man who had been a friend of Burgess before it all happened, Tom Driberg has drawn a Portrait with Background which would be remarkable if it were only a character study of a brilliant, if wayward, young man. It has the additional merit of throwing light on one of the most baffling mysteries of the twentieth century.