KNOWLEDGE WILL NOT SAVE YOU
Like many in our own time, Kim Philby took the short-cut of ideology
I found myself looking at the title to this post on one of the small sticky tabs that I use to identify interesting passages in books, in this case the former MI6 intelligence officer Tim Milne’s Kim Philby, the unknown story of the KGB’s master spy (Biteback, 2014).
Despite having written it probably only a few days before, at first I was rather startled.
KNOWLEDGE WILL NOT SAVE YOU
What the hell does that mean? And how on earth did it relate to the book?
The passage it referred to features Milne talking about a second trip to mainland Europe he made with Philby during the summer holidays in 1932, while the two friends were at university (Philby was at Cambridge and Milne at Oxford), years before they joined what is called ‘the service’.
He writes,
Things had changed somewhat from our previous journey. Kim was now even more of an ascetic, more serious without being pompous, determined not to make the slightest concession to tourism or even normal comfort. . . . But he was as interesting a companion as ever. As usual he had taken the trouble to read up the history of the area [Albania/Yugoslavia].