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. (Further details & booking available soon).
Workshop 1:
‘The Cultural Imaginary of the Cambridge Spies’. (Date/details TBC).
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