Anthony Blunt

Anthony Frederick Blunt was a British art historian who also worked for Soviet intelligence. During the Second World War he served in MI5, giving him access to classified intelligence that he passed to Soviet handlers.

Alongside his secret work, he built a distinguished public career as an art historian and Surveyor of the King’s, later Queen’s, Pictures. Anthony Blunt was born in Bournemouth, England and died in London, England.

In M. J. Carter’s Anthony Blunt, Anthony Blunt: His Lives traces the art historian and Soviet spy from a conventional upper-middle-class childhood through Cambridge, the interwar avant-garde and his recruitment into communist espionage. Blunt developed an influential scholarly career while passing intelligence to the Soviet Union, and during the Second World War he served inside MI5 with access to sensitive material. Carter places his secret work alongside the friendships, political commitments and concealed sexuality that allowed him to inhabit several communities without any one of them seeing the whole man. Antonia Senior’s Stalin’s Apostles is Antonia Senior’s history of the Cambridge Five—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross—and the intelligence they supplied to the Soviet Union.