Chris Jones

Returning home from a work trip, too jet-lagged to fall asleep, Chris Jones opened his wife’s laptop intending to get some writing done. Instead, he found a series of text messages that would burn his world to the ground. In the span of twenty minutes, he lost his wife and his best friend. Overwhelmed by sorrow and often terrifying rage, Jones contemplated suicide. He soon ended up in an emergency room, begging a doctor for help. That was the start of his journey to understand himself, to come to terms with his mistakes, to let go of anger and find forgiveness, and to give himself over to something outside of himself: an underdog English football team from an underdog northern town called Burnley. How does one rebuild a life? Can something as simple as football give someone a reason to live, offering solace and ultimately meaning? In this searing, beautiful memoir, Jones learns who we are when we care deeply. His journey through heartbreak and healing becomes a moving portrait of modern masculinity - flawed, feeling, and profoundly human.

In his short life, Liverpool-born Alexander Foote went from being a volunteer in the International Brigade in Spain to becoming an agent of Soviet military intelligence in Switzerland. Pretending to his friends that he was a dim-witted Englishman with private means, Foote became the key telegraphist of the so-called ‘Red Three’ network of radio stations, communicating top secret German intelligence to the USSR from under the noses of the Swiss authorities. The information from Foote’s Morse key originated from sources in Germany and came to Foote via the enigmatic figure of Rudolph Rossler, known as Agent Lucy. Where he obtained the information from is a mystery that has never been solved. During the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, Soviet generals came to depend on the information from Foote’s transmitter and those of his comrades.On his release from a ten-month remand in a Swiss gaol on an espionage charge, Foote absconded to Paris in 1944 before being invited for debriefing in Moscow. When he arrived, he became aware that he was under suspicion of being a British spy and it took all his wit to talk his comrades in Soviet intelligence out of sending him to the gulag: a fate that waited for many of the others in his Swiss network.Disillusioned with life in the USSR, Foote approached British intelligence while he was on a Soviet mission in Berlin. He made them an offer: if they got him back to Britain he would tell them all he knew about Soviet intelligence, from the inside.This is his story.