Funding:
24m Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Curiosity Grant (March 2026 - February 2028)
Overview of Project:
The Cambridge spy ring was one of the most audacious and controversial espionage operations of modern history, with implications that upended the mid-century Western intelligence community and that still echo across contemporary British culture and society. With the spy ring instigated in the 1930s by the secret recruitment of Cambridge alumni Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, Kim Philby, and Donald Maclean as long-term intelligence agents by the USSR, over the next decades the career paths of the group went on to deliberately compromise the most sensitive organs of British government and society – including the Security Service MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service MI6, the BBC, the Foreign Office, and even Buckingham Palace – in a way that exploited the unspoken assumptions of class-based loyalty and trust that had previously been central to the operations of the British ‘establishment’.
Crucially, the eventual detection of the spy ring and the defection of Maclean and Burgess in 1951 marked a new phase of their impact rather than an end to their influence, sparking unprecedented waves of debate within British media, scholarship, government, the intelligence community, and the cultural imaginary over the extent of the spy ring and the wider issues of secrecy, loyalty, ideology, and betrayal that their activities laid bare.
With 2026 marking seventy-five years since the first public revelation of the spies, this Curiosity project will therefore instigate a multidisciplinary analysis of the complicated legacies of the Cambridge spies across this full and entwined political, social, and cultural landscape. Engaging participants including academics, archivists, cultural producers, educators, and government stakeholders, the project’s aim is to address a series of interlocked research areas, which include:
- interrogating the legacy of these spies within the practices of government and the intelligence community;
- understanding how the ring influenced cultural and media understandings of espionage, intelligence, and the conduct of the cold war; and
- analysing how the evolving revelations about the Cambridge Five impacted wider social debates over trust, loyalty, and political ideology, in these cases further complicated by questions over the spies’ sexuality, class, and the operation of ‘the establishment’.
Project Activity and Events:
Project Launch and Roundtable:
‘The Afterlives of the Cambridge Spies’
Wednesday, March 18 from 5pm to 6:30 pm GMT
Durham University (with online option).
Register here: https://forms.office.com/e/TxVEvgjvcn
Overview
Join us for this hybrid launch to the ‘Afterlives of the Cambridge Spies’ AHRC Curiosity Project, featuring an introduction to the project by the investigators, followed by roundtable discussion involving an interdisciplinary panel of participants.
Panel members include:
- Berenice “Berry” Burnett (doctoral candidate for War Studies at KCL working on the Cambridge spies, and a civil servant);
- Mark Dunton (Principal Records Specialist for contemporary records at The National Archives and previously lead curator for the highly successful MI5: Official Secrets exhibition in 2025);
- Antonia Senior (writer, journalist, podcaster, book critic at The Times and author of forthcoming book Stalin’s Apostles); and
- John Taylor (former member of the Foreign Office, author, lecturer and advisor on handling human sources of secret intelligence).
This event will be chaired and introduced by the Project Leads, James Smith (Professor, English Studies, Durham University) and Michael Goodman (Professor & Director of the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence).
Lecture:
‘75 Years of the Cambridge Spies’. May 2026 at TNA and online.
Seventy-five years after the first defections of Burgess and Maclean, we hosted Gordon Corera (author and journalist) in discussion with Gill Bennett (historian) at The National Archives, as they investigated the legacy of these spies.
A full recording of the discussion is available at: The Cambridge Spy Ring: 75 Years since the first defections
Workshop 1:
‘The Cultural Imaginary of the Cambridge Spies’
18 September 2026
The National Archives, Kew, London
We will be holding a one-day workshop exploring the extensive cultural impacts of the Cambridge Spies. This will be an in-person event hosted by The National Archives, in Kew, London, on the day of 18th September 2026.
2026 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the defection of Burgess and Maclean, and since this time the ongoing revelations about this espionage ring have reverberated throughout British culture: influencing generations of spy novels and films, generating ongoing media and biographical investigations, and prompting wider public debates about the role of trust, loyalty, class, and sexuality in the operations of the British establishment.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together people working on different facets of the cultural legacy of the Cambridge Spies, and particularly to allow space for understanding the historical, ethical, aesthetic and psychological challenges of mediating and understanding the spies through cultural lenses.
We aim to link people working across different spheres of cultural work, and we welcome participants including:
- academics working in literary, dramatic, film, and television fields with research interests in the spies;
- biographers working on members of the spy ring or other figures implicated in the unfolding investigations;
- historians with interests in the cultural or social impacts of the spies;
- creative writers, dramatists, screenwriters, and gaming developers who have either depicted these spies, or been influenced by the issues and themes the Cambridge Spies have generated.
Full plans for the day will developed in light of the interests of selected attendees. We anticipate that the workshop will be structured in thematic sessions and that each participant will be invited to give a short & informal talk on their area of interest to help lead a specific session.
Please note, we still have a very small number of slots for further attendees available. Please email the project lead james.smith3@durham.ac.uk to express your interest in attending, including a short (one paragraph) description of your interest in this topic and the aspect you might want to discuss if selected, and a biographical note or CV.
Workshop 2:
‘Trust, Security, Loyalty: Lessons of the Cambridge Spies for Practitioners’. (Date/details TBC).
Workshop 3:
‘Teaching the Cambridge Spies’. (Date/details TBC).
Conference:
‘The Legacies of the Cambridge Spies’. An interdisciplinary event to mark the conclusion of the project’s programme of activity., (Planned for late 2027, date and further details to be advertised later in 2026).
Project Leads:
Professor James Smith, University of Durham
Professor Michael S Goodman, King’s College London
Project Partner:
The National Archives