Anthony Blunt: His Lives

by Miranda Carter (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2002

  $18.68

  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 .

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $4.16

  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.