Born in Davenport, the son of an officer in the Royal Navy, Burgess was educated at Eton, the Royal Naval College and Cambridge, where he was an excellent student (and was elected to the elite Apostle society, known for its significant number of hmosexual members).

At Cambridge, where he enrolled in 1930, he was introduced to both homosexuality and communism, which had gained increased currency among left-wing intellectuals such as the economics tutor at Burgess' college, Trinity, Maurice Dobb.

Burgess, along with Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, was a member of the grpup of Soviet spies in Britain whose activities were uncovered in the early 1950s. Maclean was bisexual, though Burgess strenuously denied that they had ever been lovers. The activities of anther contemporary spy and homosexual, Anthony Blunt, only became publicly known in the 1970s. With Maclean, Burgess defected to the Soviet Union in 1951, lived the rest of his life there and died in Moscow.

His lover's name was Tolya. Burgess life is the subject for the film Another Country.