UNDERCOVER

Two Secret Lives

TONY SCOTLAND

Biography of the highest order … vivid and astonishing … one of the most intriguing, and memorable, books I have read in years.

(Simon Heffer, The Daily Telegraph, 2 December 2024)

The last Lord Talbot de Malahide was a retired ambassador with a secret past in MI6, a passion for rare plants and an eye for young men. Monkish and aloof, he lived alone in a castle in Ireland and on a colonial estate in Tasmania, where, in the Sixties, he met Tony Scotland, a young television reporter, 35 years his junior and newly arrived from England with a secret of his own. Buttoned-up and far from home, they found a bond in their own psychology. Scotland was invited to Malahide Castle, and drawn into a perverse crusade to change his nature. Breaking free, he joined the BBC in a team of legendary voices on Radio Three. Half a century later he discovered that Talbot may have been a Soviet spy – like his friends at Cambridge, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt. In searching for the facts, Undercover touches on English public school and university life in the Thirties, the club culture of the unreformed Foreign Office, the rise of Communism in S. E. Asia, the revolution in BBC news and the decline of the Anglo-Irish. Through it all runs an undercurrent of homosexuality, offset with wry humour.

Lord Talbot de Malahide, 1967

Tony Scotland as a young television reporter in Hobart, 1967

Lord Talbot’s six volumes of ‘The Endemic Flora of Tasmania’

The Georgian homestead on Milo Talbot’s Malahide estate in Tasmania

Malahide Castle, County Dublin, seat of the Talbots of Malahide

A painting of Scotland which Talbot commissioned from Tasmanian artist Tony Woods, 1968

The team of Radio Three announcers in 1972. Back row, Jon Curle, Victor Hallam, Tony Scotland, Donald Price, Cormac Rigby; front row, Tom Crowe, Peter Barker, Patricia Hughes, Robin Holmes, Norman Macleod.

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