The Portrait of a Spy as a Young Man

In 1941, a teenage William Catesby is offered a place at the University of Cambridge, but decides to turn it down in favour of joining the army and supporting the war effort. In 2014, now in his nineties, Catesby recounts his story to his granddaughter for the first time. Their interviews weave together the historical, the personal and the emotional, skipping between different decades and continents as they reveal a complex and conflicted man.

Catesby's life is not just about spying and the trauma of war, but of lost love, yearning and hope for the future.