Quote:[size=12pt]Among the books Kim Philby kept in his Moscow flat – besides novels by Austen and Thackeray, old annals from Westminster School, and well-thumbed works by Marx and Engels – was a copy of the 1972 Wisden Almanack.

After his defection, Philby’s fondness for cricket became part of the mythology surrounding his life in exile. It’s true that Murray Sayle, the only western journalist to interview Philby in Moscow, found him by waiting outside the foreign post office in the hope that the old spy would stop by to buy a copy of The Times so he could check the county scores.

You suspect the poignancy of it, the idea of Philby’s pining after distant English pleasures, pleased the friends and colleagues who had once accompanied him to Lord’s, and whom he had so thoroughly betrayed while working as one of the Cambridge Five.[/size]