Trotsky's Favourite Spy: The Life of George Alexander Hill by Peter Day

Trotsky's Favourite Spy: The Life of George Alexander Hill Reviews

• 
  Ted

  Peter Day has done a commendable job of researching George Hill's life and bringing it to print. He's consulted Hill's published works, his correspondence and his unpublished manuscripts; interviewed family members and friends; read his official reports in the National Archives at Kew and accessed documents and photographs from the Imperial War Museum. He's also investigated a number of other sources that mention Hill, some favorably, some not. In short, he's left no stone unturned.
  
  What emerges from this effort is a realistic portrait of a complex, larger than life individual who endured a ton of varied life experiences (many of them in challenging wartime circumstances) and somehow managed to come through it all unscathed, overweight and contented.
  
  Hill's legend is based primarily on his wartime experiences... and to some degree on his published memoirs of those events. During and after WWI and WWII Hill was involved in British military intelligence, sabotage, espionage and counter espionage activities directed against Germany and its allies and Bolshevik Russia. These experiences are described in his memoirs (Go Spy the Land and Dreaded Hour) and helped to make him an icon in the fields of military intelligence and espionage. In writing this book, Peter Day also presents information found in the unpublished manuscript of Hill's third memoir Reminiscences of Four Years With the NKVD in which Hill reflects on his work in Moscow from 1941-1945 as a liaison between the Special Operations Executive and the NKVD. There seems to be a lot of interesting information in this manuscript and hopefully it will be published someday and made available to readers.
  
  Day also writes about Hill's life outside the military but doesn't provide much detail on these activities and when they occurred. He briefly describes a period in the 1920s when Hill and some of his wartime colleagues worked with Royal Dutch Shell on an unsuccessful attempt to recover their oil rights in Baku. He also writes about a business that Hill began in England during the 1920s that may have failed with the Great Depression. More interesting for me, was that during this time, Hill, with the help of his brother in law, became involved in show business. He published his memoirs in 1932 and 1936, collaborated on the screenplay for a movie and wrote and produced two plays that were performed in the U.S., England and Germany. For a while he was also manager of the Globe Theatre in London. These experiences add some spice to Hill's appeal and to his legend.
  
  Reading this book, I was impressed by Hill and his varied experiences and by the research conducted by the author. At the same time, I found the style of writing much less engaging than the style in Hill's memoirs. Day's writing seemed to be more fluid and clearer when he was drawing his information from Hill's memoirs and his unpublished manuscript. The text became more muddled when he was relying on other sources. My rating for this one would be 3.5.
• 
  Beth

  Having previously read 'Go Spy the Land', I was swooning over Captain Hill before I got my little mitts on this. The life story of a real-life James Bond: an absolute gentlemen, a spy, a ladies man, a killer.
  
  This is a gem.
• 
  John

  The biographical account of George Alexander Hill’s life and times; and a thoroughly enjoyable read.
  
  A while back, I picked up ‘Go Spy the Land’: the autobiographical account. This, Peter Day’s rendition, does provide us with much closer look [inspection] of Hill’s personal life, even so, I’m glad I chose to read ‘Go Spy the Land’ before this.
  
  I doubt it possible to see inside the head of someone you’ve never met. I’m often irked when reading history and told by ‘the historian’ of a person’s thoughts and motivations, when that person walked the earth 400 years ago.
  
  The author’s opening statement suggests: ‘It was my great good fortune to meet George Hill’s only surviving daughter. A woman who spent little time with her father and barely knew him.
  
  George Hill spied for Britain. Most of his spying went on in Russia during the early part of the previous century. During the ‘Red Terror’ he put his life on the line in order to protect the proletariate: a people he had the greatest reverence for.
  
  He remains one of Britain’s greatest and bravest patriots.
• 
  Claire Turner

  The life of Captain George Hill. Is this the man the character Commander James Bond is based upon? It reads that way.
  
  A great read: his bravery, his wit, his cunning, his determination, his lovers, his faults, his foibles, his compassion and his lack of it. A man who was as tough as old shoe-leather.
  
  A thoroughly engrossing read.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Jimp

  A brave and selfless man. He comes across as a true gentleman. Yes, he was not shy of a little romance when the chance came his way. I'm sure that was true of many men and women, when your living every day on a high-wire.
  
  A great read.
• 
  William DuFour

  An interesting character in the spying realm. A man of some contradictions.