- Hardcover: 608 pages
- Publisher: Macmillan; First Edition edition (30 Oct 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0333033504
- ISBN-13: 978-0333633502
- ASIN: 0333633504
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.5 x 5.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 400,869 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
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.'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is an excellent tour de force of the enigma at the centre of the Cambridge Spy Ring. The author offers no glib answers as to why Blunt did what he did. Instead she lets his friends, lovers, enemies and those members of the Security Forces who tracked him down to do her talking for her. She does not condemn or condone so this book lacks moral vigour, though it is none the worse for this. It is a wonderful examination of a man who was brilliant intellectually but feeble and often corrupt in his personal life. I recommend it heartily to anyone who seeks to understand a breed of privileged Englishman who has disappeared under the weight of egalitarianism.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Easily the best book on Anthony Blunt
Of all the books written on Blunt this is easily the best, superbly written, impecably researched, even surpasses The Climate of Treason:Five Who Spied For Russia which was the... Read more
Published 3 months ago by FLF
How many British deaths in the war were a result of Blunt and the...
The writer casually mentions at one point the number of deaths John Cairncross' betrayal may have cost Britain. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Great happy harmony
Anthony Blunt-Untouchable
I read this to get insight into the life of Anthony Blunt after reading the novel by John Banville,the Untouchable, based loosely on Anthony Blunt. Read more
Published 22 months ago by boring.housewife
thank you
Thank you for filling in much of my history blank....I repeat all the above praises for this fine work and marvel at a young person with capabilities to compile such a book. Read more
Published on 17 Dec 2006 by Sheryl Allen
'A low dishonest decade'
This is a masterly biography, confidently earning its many awards. The pressures and influences that shaped the middle class students at Oxford and Cambridge between the wars... Read more
Published on 8 Mar 2004 by Withnail67
The Most Famous Quintet
The individuals who comprised The Cambridge Five have been extensively documented as individuals as well as a group. Read more
Published on 28 Nov 2002 by taking a rest
To understand the Twentieth Century
this book is essential. Revisionist histories of the Twentieth Century only go so far, but in the microcosm of a biology of an extraordinary man,we can come to truly appreciate the... Read more
Published on 18 Nov 2002 by Louise Dean
An extraordinary, but ultimately flawed human.......
I finished reading this book yesterday and today I have found myself pondering on the ghastly contradictions and ultimate pathos of this flawed, but fascinating... Read more
Published on 16 Nov 2002 by Saffy
Weak and unconvincing
The book is a patchy collection of chapters full of pseudo-literary fluff. Voluminous and abounding with lengthy descriptions it tells very little about the person in question. Read more
Published on 8 Nov 2002
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. Read more
Published on 9 Jan 2002 by R. C. I. Arzonie
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