Guy Burgess was a British diplomat and Soviet double agent and a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring, which operated from the mid-1930s into the early Cold War. He was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1935 on the recommendation of Kim Philby. Working as a confidential secretary at the Foreign Office after 1944, he gained access to secret information on British foreign policy in the critical post-1945 years, and it is estimated he passed thousands of documents to his Soviet handlers. In 1951 he fled to Moscow with Donald Maclean just as Maclean was about to be unmasked. Burgess had been sent home from his Washington posting after repeated misbehaviour, and he was later dismissed from the Foreign Office after being accused of coming to work drunk. His defection caused a serious breach in Anglo-US intelligence cooperation. He never returned to Britain and died in Moscow in 1963.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.