Memoirs of a British Agent — R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Folio Society

In September 1918, a Scottish diplomat sat in a cell inside the Kremlin, accused of plotting to shoot Lenin. He had arrived in Russia six years earlier as a junior vice-consul with a talent for football and a weakness for married women, and he would leave it as one of the most notorious Britons alive. This is his account of how that happened.

Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart was Acting Consul-General in Moscow when the first revolution broke out in 1917. He was sent home that autumn over an affair, and recalled again in January 1918 — this time as head of the British Mission to the Bolsheviks, with official relations severed and nobody entirely certain what his job was, least of all the Foreign Office. He knew Trotsky. He argued with him. He watched the old order come apart at close quarters and wrote it all down afterwards with an honesty that must have caused a good deal of discomfort in Whitehall.

Then came the Ambassadors' Plot, Fanny Kaplan's bullets, arrest, the Kremlin cell, and eventual release in exchange for Litvinov. Lockhart published the book in 1932 and it made him famous all over again. Hollywood filmed it two years later.

The woman on the front board is Moura Budberg, who was his lover in Moscow and afterwards belonged to Gorky, and afterwards to H. G. Wells. She is the reason this is a love story as much as a political memoir, and Lockhart was too good a writer to pretend otherwise.

The Folio Society edition of 2003, second printing 2004. Quarter blue cloth over laminated pictorial boards, with photographs of Lockhart and Moura printed across Russian newsprint reporting the affair, gilt lettering to the spine, and the original blue slipcase. Introduction, epilogue and notes by Robin Bruce Lockhart, the author's son, who also wrote the life of Sidney Reilly and had been told his father's covert work would stay classified for a century. 280 pages, with sixteen pages of photographic plates.

Condition: Fine. The gilt is bright, the laminate lies flat with no lifting at the corners, the boards are square and the binding tight. Pages and plates are clean throughout, with no foxing and no inscriptions. The slipcase is unsplit and unmarked. A copy that appears never to have been read.

Free UK delivery. Hand-packed in stiff card and packing paper, as everything here is.