Last update - 03 January 2017

Welcome to my website!

My latest book, co written with Jeremy Dronfield, A Very Dangerous Woman, has now been published.

It documents the life of Moura Budberg, an intriguing adventuress, alluring seductress and mistress of two of the century’s greatest writers, H G Wells, and Maxim Gorky. However the true love of her life was the British Agent in Russia during the Revolution – Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. The latter was involved in a plot to assassinate Lenin and overthrow the Bolshevik government.

 She was under surveillance by MI5 for thirty years as a suspected Russian spy. Guy Burgess came to her parties. She was Nick Clegg’s great-great-aunt.

‘A Very Dangerous Woman’ - Reviews

'A fast-paced story of European intrigue, featuring an enigmatic, strong-willed woman [whose] survival story is fascinating.'

(Publishers Weekly)

'The authors draw on diaries, correspondence, and newly released files to create a powerful study that attracts sympathy toward their subject. It also produces a great snapshot of life in Russia during the collapse of the czarist regime through the early part of the Joseph Stalin era.'

(Library Journal)

‘Conjures up a vivid and alluring version of old Russia’

(Mail on Sunday)

‘[The authors] have done a sterling job of piecing together the pieces of this mysterious, peripatetic life… they are very clear about the limits of what can and cannot be known from the extant evidence’

(Daily Telegraph)

‘An astoundingly unbelievable life well retold in this gripping new biography. Well-written too. The book’s account of the Lockhart Affair is particularly fascinating, recreating the paranoid, anti-Western world that was Soviet Russia in the late 19-teens and early 1920s.’

(Russian Life)

‘This book could read like a thriller, yet the thorough research here provides a weightier feast… impressive… alive… a well-researched and well-ordered biography’

(Spectator)

‘There is an echo of foxy, seductive Scarlett O'Hara about Moura Budberg’

(Herald)

‘A thrilling new biography of baroness and double agent Moura Budberg…. Brave and multi-faceted, a mosaic monument to a mistress of deceit.’

(Russia Beyond the Headlines)

‘McDonald and Dronfield’s summaries of events during the revolutionary period make a coherent narrative from a bafflingly complex series of events’

(The Guardian)

‘A rollicking good read’

(Country Life)

‘The tale of Baroness Moura Budberg is a splendid one… entertaining and well-researched.’

(Dr. Mark Galeotti, Clinical Professor of Global Affairs, New York University)

'Hard to go wrong with Moura's combustible life, and the authors relish her excesses'.

(Independent)

‘An extraordinarily complex story based on a fabulous cache of rich material… the end result really is an example of truth being stranger than fiction’

(Good Book Guide)

‘An incredible, beautifully written story that succeeds not only in giving a powerful insight into the lengths to which some people will go to preserve their very existence, but an absorbing and colourful account of the individuals and events that changed the world in the first half of the twentieth century.’

(Susan Ottaway author Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice: The True Story of WWII Special Agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne)

 

‘Temptress, seductress, sexploiter, call her what you will, Moura had espionage running through her veins, and all is revealed in this fascinating account of her mysterious life.’

(Nigel West, author of Operation Garbo)