There is no more infamous spy ring than the Cambridge Five, the group of friends who met at Cambridge University in the 1930s, were recruited by Soviet agents, and then proceeded to feed intelligence to Moscow from their various perches in British government. The best known, certainly, was Kim Philby, the model for the traitor in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; the fact that Philby knew the author as fellow spy David Cornwell and blew his cover, leading Cornwell to begin a new career as a novelist under the pen name John le Carré, is the only good thing Philby ever did. Antonia Senior tells this tale of treachery very well, vividly capturing the personalities and politics of the time and describing in detail just how much damage these men did, especially in Eastern Europe. Stalin’s Apostles reads like a first-rate thriller, except the blood is real and the damage done is infuriating.
Those robins and cardinals in your backyard are impressive in their own right, but how much more impressive is it that they, like all birds, are descended from dinosaurs? Stephen L. Brusatte is an acclaimed paleontologist who wrote a best-seller about dinosaurs several years ago, and here he turns his attention to how we came to have more than 10,000 species of birds today. He writes engagingly with an eagle eye for detail, and once you read this book you will never look at a sparrow, let alone an emu, the same way again.
