Publishers Bloomsbury launch Papa Spy at Daunts bookshop, Marylebone High Street tonight.

The book has generated huge interest already and this evening’s party is expected to draw on an invite list that includes a range of overt and covert friends and sources Jimmy has built up during a thirty year career as a journalist and author.

Special guests include relatives of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Ann Bowes Lyon (cousin of the Queen mother), whose friendships with Jimmy’s late father, Tom Burns are covered in the book with hitherto unpublished detail.

Among the expected speakers at the event will be Bloomsbury’s founder and chief executive Nigel Newton, showing that the publishers believe there is life-after-Potter, and see Papa Spy, as an important book in their autumn list.

The author Jimmy Burns has described the book, subtitled Love, Faith & Betrayal in wartime Spain, as his most challenging and ambitious of his published works.

“It’s not easy writing about one’s father, not least when you have to dig for the answer to the question, ‘What did you do in the war, Papa?’ after he has died, and find yourself in a world of secret love affairs, espionage and propaganda, straddling the Spanish Civil War and World War 11,” Burns says.

Papa Spy is part biography, part history, covering a very unreported part of WW2:  Churchill’s secret campaign to keep Hitler from invading Spain and Portugal, the success of which made a vital contribution to the Allied cause. This is the true story of the winter in Madrid.

Over the next few weeks, Jimmy will be talking about his book at a number of venues including the Wigtown Festival (October 2^nd); Waterstones, Putney (October 6^th), Instituto Cervantes, London (October 27^th), Cambridge University (October 28^th) and Battersea Library (November 28^th). 

Reviews in major national newspapers are expected in the coming days but comments are already coming in. A sample…

“Tom Burns inhabited intricate worlds, to which his son, Jimmy, is a lucid and fluent guide: British and Spanish high society, the hive-like intensity of life in wartime Madrid, and the intersecting complexities of Anglo-Spanish espionage (in which my own father worked with Jimmy’s). With extraordinary detachment and an abundance of flair, which recall the professional diablerie of the spies, Jimmy makes sense of events that baffled their beholders and weaves into his study of his father’s life a fascinating tale of the perils, prejudices, jealousies and internecine conflicts with which the secret service was riven.” FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO, author and historian

“A thrilling book, written with passion and precision.” JAVIER CERCAS, best-selling international Spanish novelist

“This book will be full of interest for readers who care about Spain and Spanish history….a compelling and lively read.” DAVID BRIGHTY, former British ambassador in Spain