of their flight to the People than by the flight itself. When Stephen Spender showed the Daily Express a friend’s letter about Burgess, he was held to have disgraced himself." Rees sat on the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution and played an influential role in getting the testimony of gay men heard. He spent the last years of his life in Aberystwyth. He wrote a column (signed "R") on current political affairs for Encounter. He also wrote two autobiographies, A Bundle of Sensations (1960) and A Chapter of Accidents (1972). He appears under the name "Eddie" in Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Death of the Heart (1938) (Victoria Glendinning Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer.) Rees died of cancer on 12 December 1979 at Charing Cross Hospital in London. Communism and anti-communism During the 1930s, Rees was a Marxist intellectual. He came into contact with the Cambridge Five spy ring through friend Guy Burgess. The Hitler-Stalin Pact led him to take a strong anti-communist stance, which he put into writing by 1948: "A spectre is haunting Europe." The words are more true today than they were when two hopeful young men wrote them almost exactly one hundred years ago. Today the spectre has ceased to be a bogy. It is a solid, established fact, ruling some 250,000,000 people and preparing, with admirable thoroughness, advanced positions from which it can reach out to extend its rule over Western Europe.) In her memoir, daughter Jenny Rees wrote that Rees her father was fascinated by the Hiss-Chambers Case in America (1948-1950), which marked a sharp divide intellectually between him and Burgess: 'Hiss was certainly guilty; he was precisely the sort of person who was capable of carrying out the systematic program of espionage which Whittaker Chambers, so improbably as it seemed, had accused him; and only a communist could be capable of such a feat...' But according to Guy, it was Hiss, not Chambers, who deserved the admiration. He seemed acutely conscious of the parallels of the Hiss Case with the Cambridge Five (specifically Burgess) when he wrote "I have no intention to be the British Whittaker Chambers." (Others have made the comparison.) He reviewed Chambers's memoir Witness (1952) favorably for The Spectator. At the end of his life he admitted spying for the USSR for a short time, and accused MI5 man Guy Liddell of also being a spy. His son