Martin Gilbert's Winston S. Churchill, volume V, pp. 990-992, describes the meeting between Churchill and Burgess and the presentation of this book. "Churchill spent Saturday October 1 [1938] at Chartwell, where he was visited by a young BBC producer, Guy Burgess, who, after some difficulty, had persuaded the BBC to ask Churchill to give a half-hour talk on the Mediterranean. As a result of the Czech crisis, Churchill asked to cancel the talk; then invited Burgess to visit him and talk it over. Burgess arrived at eleven o'clock. According to Burgess's biographer (Tom Driberg. Guy Burgess, a Portrait wth Background, 1956), Churchill was carrying a trowel when Burgess arrived, as he had been building a wall." Churchill was pre-occupied at the time with Chamberlain's submission to Hitler over Czechoslovakia at Munich. He had received a plea for advice from the Czech President, Benes (whom he referred to as 'Herr Beans') and, to Burgess's evident surprise, asked the young producer for his views on the subject. Burgess "'suggested diffidently that Churchill could offer the assistance of his eloquence: he could stump the country with speeches of protest' ... Churchill gave his visitor a copy of Arms and the Covenant, which he inscribed: 'To Guy Burgess, from Winston S. Churchill, to confirm his admirable sentiments.' They had talked together for some hours."
Guy Burgess (1910-63) was educated at Cambridge University where he joined the Communist Party. Recruited as a Soviet spy in the 1930's, he worked with the BBC (1936-39), wrote war propaganda (1939-41), and, while ostensibly working for the BBC, served with MI5. After the war he was a member of the foreign office, and finally second secretary under Kim Philby in Washington in 1950. Recalled in 1951 for "serious misconduct," he, together with Donald Maclean, another "Cambridge Spy," defected to the Soviet Union and became a resident in Moscow, where he died.