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Christopher Burney was born into an upper-class Scots family in 1917. He left school as a teenager and wandered around Europe for several years, mastering French along the way. Joining the British Army after the start of World War Two, he was recruited as a Special Operations Executive agent and parachuted into France in 1942. His network compromised, he was arrested and put into solitary confinement in Fresnes prison outside Paris, where he was held for 526 days. He was then transported to Buchenwald concentration camp, from which he was liberated in April 1945. After the war, he worked for the United Nations in New York City and Libya before becoming a banker. He spent much of the last decade of his life in a small village in France, where he died in 1980.
The courage and the intellectual integrity of Christopher Burney are far beyond what most of us would expect of ourselves. -- Frank Kermode One of the great masterpieces of contemplative literature. -- Ted Gioia
