SEAN BOURKE - The Springing of George Blake

London England, The Literary Guild, 1970. 1st Literary Guild Edition, Binding: Cloth, Very Good/Fair. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall Hardback Hardback. Slight foxing to edge. Wear and tear to edges of D/J. Couple of marks to D/J. In May 1961 a Foreign Office man named George Blake, who had been serving in Berlin shortly before his arrest, was tried at the Old Bailey on five counts of spying for the Soviet Union. On 22 October 1966 Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London. In fact, the sprining of George Blake was the work not of foreign agents but of a single adventurous Irisihman named Sean Bourke, who had been a fellow prisoner of Gerge Blake's in Wormwood Scrubs. Nor was this astonishing coup carried out for monetary reward: it was actually achieved on a borrowed £700. This extraordinary book is Sean Bourke's detailed account of how, virtually single-heanded, he planned and engineered George Blake's escape from prison; of how he spirited him out of England and then to Moscow; and of how a few eeeks later he foolowed him to Moscow by way of Paris. It is also an account of the two extraordinary years Bourke spent in Russian until his return to Ireland on 22 October 1968, the second anniversary of the jail-break. The history of the manuscript in which Bourke first wrote down the full details is itself fascinating. The book was written, in fact, in Bourke's own hand in Moscow between March and October 1968. Illustrated. 357 pp.