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.

After the war, Blunt became Director of the Courtauld Institute and Surveyor of the King’s, later the Queen’s, Pictures, helping to establish art history as a major British academic discipline while remaining protected by the social world he had betrayed. His 1964 confession brought immunity rather than public prosecution, and his treachery remained officially secret until Margaret Thatcher named him in Parliament in 1979 and his knighthood was removed. Drawing on interviews and archival material, the biography examines class privilege, institutional secrecy, criminalised homosexuality, ideological loyalty and the difficulty of reducing Blunt to either distinguished scholar or traitor alone.