Kim philby autobiography of malcolm

Trawling through the charity shops of Lewes, Brighton and Sussex for top flight first editions – something I do, as this blog attests, on a regular basis – tends to be a fairly fruitless exercise. By and large what you turn up are relatively recent books, the true gems proving few and far between.

But every now and then a real find presents itself, and such was the case with this book, bought in the Brighton branch of Oxfam Books for £6.99:

This is the British hardback first edition of My Silent War, Cambridge spy Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby's autobiography, published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1968 under a dustjacket designed by Michael Jarvis.

Crucially, however, it's also the first impression, which makes it really rather special: most of the copies listed for sale on AbeBooksare later impressions, in which two catty references to Lady Kelly, wife of Sir David Kelly, British Ambassador to Turkey and then the USSR, have been removed (the 1968 US Grove P