Anthony Blunt (HB) - Hardcover

Carter, Miranda

3.94

252 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333633504 ISBN 13: 9780333633502

Publisher: Macmillan, 2001

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The first full biography of Anthony Blunt by a brilliant new biographer.Anthony Blunt, aesthete, communist, homosexual, M15 agent and Soviet mole, was Surveyor of the King's Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute. Betrayed in 1963, he voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Later that year, she was to expose his treachery and strip him of his knighthood. While the other Cambridge spies (Philby, Burgess and Maclean) subordinated their lives and careers to espionage, Blunt had a separate passionate existence. His reputation as an art historian was second to none: he made an enormous contribution to the establishment of art history as an academic discipline; his volumes on Poussin, French and Italian art and old master drawings are still in print and some are still set texts. At the Courtauld he trained a whole generation of world-class academics and curators. A human paradox, Blunt was a highly-regarded member of the British intelligentsia but his life as such and as a member of the British homosexual subculture of the 30s, 40s and 50s has hardly been explored. Miranda Carter's brilliantly insightful biography shows how his life vividly illustrates certain key themes and moments of the 20th century: intellectual, political, sexual and social. Blunt led two totally discrete lives, he was a set of permanent contradictions and illustrates, perhaps better than anyone, that there is no one key to any human being's identity: we are all a series of conflicting selves.

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Review:

The subtitle of Miranda Carter's remarkably assured debut, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, speaks volumes for the artful spy she brings in from the cold. The so-called "Fourth Man" in the Cambridge spy ring after Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby, Blunt's life embraced a fascinating opposition. On the one hand, he was an exceptional teacher, who inspired and influenced a generation of art historians through his lectures and tuition while director of the Courtauld Institute; on the other, he was a spy who betrayed secrets to the Soviet NKVD (later KGB). This dichotomy of enlightenment and concealment lies at the centre of Carter's spirited inquiry. A product as well as a victim of his times, Blunt's offence was not just espionage, but also his background. Educated at Marlborough, where fellow pupils included John Betjeman and Louis MacNeice, he grew into a louche left-wing homosexual of a familiar Cambridge vintage, a dissident aesthete for whom truth and kinship outweighed loyalty to orthodoxy, and thus the state. When Marxism replaced the Bloomsbury set as the Cambridge de rigeur in the 1930s, Blunt was ideologically seduced by the wildly charismatic Guy Burgess, and became a Soviet talent-spotter, and later double agent. After his sensational public exposure in 1979, he dismissed his activity as akin to "cowboys and Indians", but if his motives remain foggy, Carter makes clear the comic shambles that was British intelligence at the time, more Carry On than John Le Carr�, everyone with an agenda, and usually not their own.

Miranda Carter's precocious disentangling of the mesh of half-truths that characterise this period of British intelligence, and its intelligentsia, reaps bountiful dividends. Burgess once sniped that Blunt was holding out for canonisation rather than a knighthood, a remark that reflected his highly principled friend's preference for history over politics, despite his clandestine activities. It is history, though, which has the longer memory, and dictates that he is to be remembered more as a spy than an art historian. Blunt's own account of his duplicitous career is embargoed until 2013, and speculation is markedly polarised as to how much it will reveal. Until then, Carter offers a scrupulously researched, finely balanced assessment of his Russian-doll persona and troubled reputation, while boldly establishing her own as a significant new writing talent.--David Vincent

Review:

'Compelling...judicious' -- David Eskerdjian, Financial Times

'Does not put a foot wrong. This is a formidably good biography' -- Michael Hall, Country Life, 15 November 2001

'Fascinating...one of the most thoughtful and intelligent biographies of recent years' -- Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday, 18 November 2001

'Finely researched...the scruple, the clarity of Carter's narrative of Communist enlistments at Cambridge would be hard to better...thoughtful and thorough.' -- George Steiner, TLS

'Immediately establishes her as one of Britain's most promising young biographers ... Admirable' -- Christopher Andrew, The Times, 7 November 2001

'Meticulously researched and fascinating' -- Francis King, Literary Review

'Miranda Carter [is] a writer of commendable tenacity, and the possessor of a conspicuous moral centre ...' -- Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times

'The book is good and renders superfluous all others on the subject ... 500 pages that almost make a ripping yarn.' -- Brian Sewell, Evening Standard

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