Anthony Blunt

From Barnes & Noble

Anthony Blunt was the most notorious British spy of the 20th century. Many books have been written about his exploits as a Soviet agent, but there hasn't been a full-scale Blunt biography -- until now. Miranda Carter has spent eight years researching this fascinating look at how the left-wing intellectual, art expert, and deeply closeted homosexual became one of Britain's most dangerous men.

Michiko Kakutani

Mrs. Carter has created a fascinating portrait of that most anomalous of career hyphenates: the art scholar-spy, a portrait that should go down as one of the most informative and compelling books yet on the Cambridge spies.
— New York Times

Waldemar Januszczak

Miranda Carter [is] an instinctive mistruster of givens, a writer of commendable tenacity, and the possessor of a conspicuous moral centre that serves as a much-needed compass for her as she makes her way around the maddeningly confusing geography that is the life of the Fourth Man.... The result is a profoundly worrying portrait of a uniquely British monster.
—The Sunday Times (London)

From The Critics

Anthony Blunt—formerly Sir Anthony Blunt—was a vicar's son who grew up to become a world-renowned art historian, a not-so-secret homosexual and a top-secret Soviet agent who betrayed his country for no immediately apparent reason. (He converted to Marxism in the '30s, but his Soviet handlers were struck by his lack of interest in politics.) Despising the respectability into which he was born, Blunt spent his life aping it in public and flouting it in private. For his troubles, Margaret Thatcher exposed him as a spy in the House of Commons in 1979 and stripped him of his knighthood. Now Carter has sought to make sense of his strange story. Her carefully researched, compulsively readable biography is written with a good deal more sympathy than its dreadful subject deserves. Instead of focusing exclusively on Blunt's spying, Carter has taken a wide-ranging look at the remainder of his complicated life, revealing him to have been "a particular type of Englishman in whom almost all emotional effort was diverted into the denial of feeling." He was, in short, the very sort of fellow who so often ends up selling out his fellow men.
—Terry Teachout

Publishers Weekly

This engaging and important biography examines the many masks of the infamous Anthony Blunt (1907-1983), the Cambridge art historian turned spy who worked simultaneously for British Intelligence and the Soviet Union during WWII. Why did he betray his country? Carter provides an exhaustive psychological study of Blunt's early life. His brutalizing public school (where he was unhappy and unpopular), Carter argues, "inadvertently fostered a questioning and subversive attitude and a profound distrust of authority." When the Depression hit England in the 1930s and the specter of fascism threatened Europe, communism became fashionable among left-leaning intellectuals like Blunt and his Cambridge friend Guy Burgess. Blunt's homosexuality, like Burgess's, also appears to have alienated him from the establishment. During WWII, Blunt was assigned to British intelligence, giving him easy access to military secrets, which he smuggled to the Soviets. After his Cambridge spy friends Burgess, Donald MacLean and Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union after the war, British Intelligence began investigating Blunt. In 1964, he was granted immunity in exchange for his confession and full cooperation. British intelligence worked hard to keep "the Blunt affair" a secret. He wasn't publicly exposed until 1979, when Margaret Thatcher denounced him. The biggest challenge any Blunt biographer faces is Blunt himself, a man of almost legendary emotional detachment. Blunt revealed little about his personal life, yet Carter has managed to bring readers as close to this enigmatic man as humanly possible. Thoroughly researched and carefully crafted, this is sure to be the definitive biography. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Publisher and journalist Carter's first book is a massive and meticulously researched study of "the lives" of Anthony Blunt arguably the most enigmatic of the Cambridge-educated spies associated with Burgess, Maclean, and Philby. Before his exposure in 1979, Blunt was known primarily as an art historian and director of the Courtauld Institute. Carter's 18-chapter biography begins with "Son" and closes predictably with "Traitor." The way stations in between present not only a multifaceted portrait of the man but also a panorama of 50 years of British intellectual life. Carter presents vivid accounts (enlivened by the recollections from scores of interviews with Blunt's friends and colleagues) of Blunt's public school experiences at Marlborough College, his companions and escapades at Cambridge, and his transformation from left-wing intellectual rebel and homosexual into an outwardly conforming member of the establishment. However, even this flow of information fails to explain Blunt's acts and motives. Not surprisingly, many of those interviewed have markedly different recollections of crucial events. Indeed, if this biography has a fault, it is that the writer presents the reader with too many versions of the elusive Blunt's remarkable lives. For large public libraries and academic libraries with an interest in espionage. Robert C. Jones, Central Missouri State Univ., Warrensburg Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

British journalist Carter limns the complex life and fascinating times of the eminent art historian best known for being exposed in 1979 as a former Soviet spy.