Product Description

When Anthony Blunt died in 1983, he was a man about whom almost anything could be - and was - said. As Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute, Blunt's position was assured until his exposure in 1979 left his reputation in tatters. Miranda Carter's brilliantly insightful biography gives us a vivid portrait of a human paradox. Blunt's totally discrete lives, with their permanent contradictions, serve to remind us that there is no one key to any human being's identity: we are all a series of conflicting selves.

'Astonishingly good' Daily Telegraph

'Highly impressive... sensitive and compelling... Miranda Carter has written a richly informative biography which, in the end, does not fall into the trap of tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner - not only because she is not seeking to pardon him, but also because there is something here that is still quite impossible to comprehend.' Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

'A compelling biography... Miranda Carter's skill at scouring the different compartments of Blunt's life is deeply impressive' Julian Barnes, New Yorker

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32919 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 600 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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 Carré, 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

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

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

Customer Reviews

An almost perfect spy?
The biography is aptly titled. Anthony Blunt really was a man with a multi-faceted life - more like a few lives crammed into one - complete with paradoxes and contradictions aplenty. In many ways he was an unlikely spy, and by the same token, an almost perfect one!

This is a meticulously written biography. Carter digs deep and wide with her research and reports back in a calm, measured, credible and lengthy manner. An excellent collage of Blunt is built up. Conflicting views of the man emerge - petty/professional, cold/effusive, insightful/blind, opinionated/persuadable - and this really helps to establish the light and shade in the man's nature. Carter makes human that which could easily have been made monstrous.

The only caution I hazard about this book is that the Pan McMillan paperback version contains numerous, silly typos. Otherwise this is a stimulating, entertaining and sustaining book.

The Lives within Lives of Anthony Blunt
Miranda Carter has written a splendid book about Anthony Blunt, appropriately subtitled, "his lives." Reading about the Cambridge Fellow, Soldier, Double Agent, Art-Historian, Director of the Cortauld Institute, Surveyor of the King's/Queens Pictures, etc., etc., is like peeling an onion, or perhaps--more appropriately--opening a Russian Matrioshka doll. As one probes into a deeper layer one discovers yet another persona, and although one might begin to understand Blunt's motives, one never really gets to know who he really was, thanks to his ability to compartmentalize his multifarious activities and interests.

Although I began the book with considerable prejudice, since Anthony Blunt seems to have prospered while his fellow Cambridge spies were living comparatively miserable lives in Moscow, Ms. Carter's sensitive portrayal of this man, whose aloofness stemmed from a fundamental insecurity, changed my mind. She shows us a man who was unwavering in his ideals and loyal to his friends (He waited until 1964--after Guy Burgess had died and Philby and Maclean were 'safe' in Moscow-- to admit his complicity.). She also portrays a tormented man, whose ability to lose himself in his art-history scholarship preserved his sanity and probably saved his life. Publicly disgraced in 1979, stripped of his knighthood and other honors (after a promise of immunity), deserted by all except a few loyal friends, he died soon after. Miranda Carter depicts him as a man who was courageous but tragically flawed.

This book is meticulously researched, so much so that an average enthusiast of espionage literature may find himself adrift among the dozens of friends, acquaintances and enemies whom Anthony Blunt knew, not only Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and the other Cambridge spy protagonists, but also literary figures, including Julian Bell, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden; and other personages--who have engendered their own share of speculation--Victor Rothschild, Michael Straight and Goronwy Rees. Precisely because of the plethora of names, the book presents a fascinating glimpse into a fifty-year history of Great Britain from the 1920's onward. And while probably only the most passionate art historians will read every word about Nicholas Poussin and Baroque Rome, the persistent reader will be rewarded by a colorful and witty glimpse into the outrageous life and times of Guy Burgess (Inexplicably no one has written a biography of the wayward spy, but if they do, it should probably be called "My Noisy War"!).

For those afficionados who cannot get enough of the Cambridge Spies (Judging from the numbers of books still being published about them, half a century later, such readers are numerous.), this book is highly recommended!

Excellent Account of a Tortured Existence
Most books about the Cambridge spy ring adopt a factual tone, concentrating on the details of betrayal: which secrets were passed to whom at which point. Miranda Carter, however, approaches the subject of Anthony Blunt from what one might call a feminine perspective. Her interest is in the aspects of the English class culture that produced a man so apparently contradictory in his behaviour. I use the word 'apparently' because Carter's account of Blunt's intellectual evolution is so carefully and sensitively drawn that we come very close to understanding the forces that divided his gifted mind into quite separate compartments.

Although the author does not take sides, one senses an understanding, if not a sympathy, for this tortured character. The brutality and emotional repression of English public school life are superbly evoked. Carter shows how Marlborough's preference for hearty, sporty, heterosexual extroverts created a de facto group of intellectual rebels who realised that they had no chance of fitting into the expected mould. Rebels like Blunt would later rise to the top of the Establishment while simultaneously rejecting its fundamental principles.

Above all, this is a profoundly sad book. The enduring image is of Blunt, in his seventies, stripped of his knighthood and glittering prizes, shuffling down to his local supermarket and then back to his flat in a dreary Bayswater block. Behind him lie years of academic acclaim, lauded seminars delivered in perfect French at the Louvre, consultations with British Royalty on their art collection: all to end like this. What a tragic waste of a brilliant mind.