Spot the deception: Guy Burgess true or false

Put your detective skills to the test. Can you work out which 2 of these incredible facts about Guy Burgess are the hidden lies?

Let us know in the comments below!

1/ Guy Burgess played in the Eton football 1st XI .

2/ His stepfather was an intelligence officer working with Lawrence of Arabia during the First World War.

3/ Guy Burgess’s sexual partners included three other Cambridge spies – Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and Michael Straight.

4/ Victor, later Lord Rothschild, was charged with manslaughter in 1931 after he killed a cyclist whilst driving from Cambridge to London.

5/ Guy Burgess was a member of the Cambridge University Socialist Society.

6/ Guy Burgess secured Firsts in both parts of the History Tripos.

7/ Guy Burgess unsuccessfully applied to teach at Eton and work at Conservative Central Office.

8/ Guy Burgess had a month’s trial as a sub-editor on The Times before joining the BBC.

9/ Guy Burgess reviewed for various papers including the New Statesman.

10/ Guy Burgess joined the London Library in December 1932.

11/ Guy Burgess was a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship.

12/ Guy Burgess figures in the 1941 novel BBC as Montmorency ‘a comic character with an air of patronage towards his instructors and a habit which even his superiors respected, of going to sleep during lectures.’

13/ Among those who broadcast for Burgess at the BBC were Christopher Isherwood, John Betjeman and the father and wife of Kim Philby.

14/ Guy Burgess regularly stayed with the writer Rosamond Lehmann but she refused to let him seduce her gardener’s handsome son.

15/ Burgess ‘had a strong preference for lorry drivers…and would cross-examine them mercilessly about how they were coping with the Depression’.

16/ Brian Howard told Harold Acton of Burgess that ‘his equipment was gargantuan – “What is known as a whopper, my dear.”’

17/ Guy Burgess is one of the beneficiaries of Louis MacNeice and WH Auden’s ‘Last Will and Testament’.

18/ At the BBC, Burgess was asked to keep an eye on Communist subversives.

19/ At the Foreign Office, Burgess was asked to keep an eye on Communist subversives

20/ Burgess claimed to be the illegitimate son of Victor Rothschild’s mother.

21/ Guy Burgess was godfather to Kim Philby’s eldest child.

22/ Guy Burgess wanted to marry Kim Philby’s mistress.

23/ Both Donald Maclean’s sister and Guy Burgess’s brother worked for MI5.

24/ Both Guy Burgess and George Orwell worked together as radio producers at the BBC.

25/ Anthony Blunt claimed that Burgess had been tasked by Russian Intelligence to befriend Winston Churchill’s niece.

26/ Guy Burgess pimped boys for various well-known British figures including the academic John Sparrow.

27/ The Cambridge Cambridge Ring produced such sensational material that Soviet Intelligence thought they were double agents.

28/ Blunt continued to act as go-between for Burgess and Philby after World War Two including photocopying documents in his room at the Courtauld.

29/ Burgess’s Ford V8 car eventually ended up as ‘a noble hen house’ on a Devon farm.

30/ Burgess dreamt of becoming the motoring correspondent of Country Life magazine.

31/ Burgess’s Foreign Office colleague in Hector McNeil’s Private Office Fred Warner later had an affair with Peter Townsend, best remembered because of his association with Princess Margaret.

32/ Guy Burgess’s colleagues in the Foreign Office News Department included the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster.

32/ A fellow passenger on the ship returning from America in 1951 was called Donald Maclean.

33/ Not just Donald Maclean but also Guy Burgess was being followed by MI5 in May 1951.

34/ Burgess adopted the cover name Roger Styles from two Agatha Christie books The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

35/ Burgess was due at a dinner party four days after he fled Britain where the other guests included Anthony Blunt, Ian Fleming and John Betjeman who met the love of his life Lady Elizabeth Cavendish

36/ Guy Burgess’s brother Nigel was offered £500 to collaborate with a water diviner to find his missing brother.

37/ Roald Dahl wrote an article on Burgess and Maclean ‘The Great Vanishing Trick’ for Women’s Home Companion.

38/ Eric Ambler wrote a series of articles on their disappearance calling it ‘the greatest mystery…since the death or disappearance of Adolf Hitler’.

39/ The cover up of the disappearance led to the coining of the phrase ‘The Establishment’.

40/ Alan Whicker was one of the reporters at Kim Philby’s press conference where he claimed he was not ‘The Third Man’.

41/ After Burgess’s disappearance, gangsters offered to arrange for the press to meet Burgess off the coast of Italy.

42/ Guy Burgess claimed to own Stendhal’s bedhead.

43/ Guy Burgess claimed his lover Tolya’s grandmother had had an affair with Tolstoy.

44/ Guy Burgess claimed that he donated his Imperial Russian china set to the Hermitage Museum ‘in grateful thanks’ for being allowed to live in the USSR.

45/ Burgess claimed to know Felix Youssopoff, the murderer of Rasputin.

46/ One of Burgess’s favourite books was David Benedictus’s novel about Eton The Fourth of June.

47/ Burgess acted as umpire in a Moscow cricket match , one team captained by Donald Maclean, where tea consisted of cucumber and caviar sandwiches.

48/ Burgess did meet Philby in Moscow shortly before his death.

49/ Guy Burgess appears in novels by Nicholas Monsarrat, John Banville and Nancy Mitford.

Here’s a coded message which might help you:
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