T. H. Rigby, ‘Harry’ Rigby to many colleagues and friends, was a leading pioneer in Soviet Studies during the Cold War. In this memoir he recounts his career as researcher, teacher, public intellectual and sometime adviser to MI6. He includes fascinating accounts of his time in the British Embassy in Moscow in the 1950s and of his later visits to the USSR, whose leadership labelled him a ‘bourgeois falsifier’, a title he wore with some pride.

His story is also of a family and his inauspicious beginnings in a working-class district of Melbourne, his education in the 1930s and 1940s, war service in New Guinea and early interest in political thought. He writes of his beloved wife Norma and their growing family against a background of sweeping change in 20th century Australia.