Free A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy by Deborah McDonald, Jeremy Dronfield

 
    Illustration Credits
     
    With kind thanks to Georgi Särekanno the keeper of the Jäneda Museum, to David King, to the Hoover Institution Library, to Peter Lofts, to Allan Warren, and also to the Manuscripts and Special Collections section of the University of Nottingham for granting permission to use their illustrations of Meriel in her nursing uniform and Moura in the snow. Thanks also to Dimitri Collingridge for the use of the photograph of Moura, to the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University for allowing us to reproduce the photograph of Yakov Peters and to Getty Images, the National Portrait Gallery, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois and the Library of Congress for all allowing us to reproduce images.
     
1  © Deborah McDonald.
2  Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to U A Lora.
3  © Tania Alexander.
4  © Buchanan Collection, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. BU B 8/1/43/4.
5  Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to fireramsey.
6  © Georgi Särekanno, private collection.
7  RN Museum © Trustees of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum
8  R N Museum © Trustees of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum
9  © Buchanan Collection, Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham.BU B 8/1/56/2.
10  © Georgi Särekanno, curator of the Jäneda Museum, and by kind permission of Enno Must.
11  Wikimedia Commons. RIA Novosti archive, image 6464/RIA Novosti/CC-BY-SA
12  Robert H. B. Lockhart Papers, Box 9, Folder 12, Hoover Institution Archives. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.
13  © David King Collection.
14  Robert H. B. Lockhart Papers, Box 10, Folder 17, Hoover Institution Archive. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.
15  © National Portrait Gallery.
16  By kind permission of Dimitri Collingridge
17  ©Tania Alexander
18  © Georgi Särekanno, Jäneda Museum.
19  Robert H B Lockhart Papers, Box 9, Folder 20, Hoover Institution Archives. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.
20  Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
21  © Tania Alexander.
22  © David King Collection.
23  © National Portrait Gallery, London.
24  © Getty Images.
25  © Peter Lofts collection RM004.
26  © Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
27  Wikimedia Commons. With thanks to Allan Warren.
     

 
    Preface
     
     
    Moura Budberg was a mystery to everyone who knew her. Even her closest friends and her children never quite figured her out.
    London in the 1950s wasn’t short of remarkable characters, but few men or women had the magnetic charm or the air of danger and mystery that surrounded Baroness Budberg. Conducting her soirées in her dark, slightly shabby flat in Kensington, she managed to attract the exotic blooms of the literary and political crop. Graham Greene, Laurence Olivier, Tom Driberg, Guy Burgess, Bertrand Russell, Hamish Hamilton, David Lean, E. M. Forster, Lady Diana Cooper, Enid Bagnold, Peter Ustinov – all came at various times to Moura’s salon to drink gin and vodka and be enchanted.
    Officially, Moura lived off her earnings as a translator of books and plays, as a script consultant and editor for Alexander Korda, and occasionally from donations charmed out of her rich friends. Moura was renowned for having been the mistress of both Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, who were besotted with her, and the lover of many other men. Physically she wasn’t a prepossessing lady – ageing and overweight, deeply lined, with a large nose badly broken in childhood, wrecked from head to foot by her appetites for food, vodka and cigars. Baroness Budberg was a walking ruin – the harrowed shell of a being who had once possessed beauty, litheness and unsurpassed attraction.
    Her charisma still compelled attention and devotion, even in her ruined state. H. G. Wells, whose offers of marriage she turned