As the death of the spy novelist John le Carre reminded us last month, the Cold War was a golden age for espionage fiction. The death last week in Moscow of the British double agent George Blake reminded us, too, that the record of actual espionage was mixed.

Of the various secret agents whose treachery embarrassed the British intelligence services in the 1950s and 1960s, including Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Harold “Kim” Philby, Anthony Blunt, and others, Blake was probably the most dangerously effective but least known to the public. The paradox may be easily explained: Philby, Burgess, and company sprang largely from Britain’s genteel classes and elite schools and universities — their attraction to the Soviet Union seemed especially contradictory. Blake, by contrast, was born in the Netherlands of a Dutch Protestant mother and a Spanish Jewish father who had grown up in Turkey and was a naturalized British subject.