Anthony Blunt: His Lives
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.41 (685 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0374105316 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 592 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-11-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
During WWII, Blunt was assigned to British intelligence, giving him easy access to military secrets, which he smuggled to the Soviets. Blunt revealed little about his personal life, yet Carter has managed to bring readers as close to this enigmatic man as humanly possible. In 1964, he was granted immunity in exchange for his confession and full cooperation. 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. British intelligence worked hard to keep "the Blunt affair" a secret. (Jan.)Forecast: Blunt's story isn'
Miranda Carter's Anthony Blunt is the first full biography of the mythical Cold War warrior, and is at once an astonishing history of one the century's greatest deceits and a deeply nuanced account of fifty years in the British power elite, as experienced by one deep inside who wished to bring it down.. And yet even as he ascended from rebellion into outward conformity, he was a homosexual when homosexuality was a crime, and a traitor when the penalty was death. Until his treachery was made public, Blunt was a world-famous art historian, recognized for his ground-breaking work on Poussin, Italian art, and old master drawings; at the Courtauld Institute he trained a whole generation of academics and curators. The first full biography of the notorious spy—and an X-ray of the British ruling class that produced him.Once an untouchable member of England's establishment—a world-famous art historian and a man knighted by the Queen of England—in a single stroke Anthony Blunt became an object of universal hatred when, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher exposed him as a
"The great trade-off" according to Jon Hunt. Miranda Carter's intriguing new book has everything one would want if this had been merely a spy novel. The good news is that Anthony Blunt was the real thing. Carter's in-depth approach and occasional analysis takes what could have been an ordinary book and raises it several notches. She gives the reader an astounding amount of the rich detail of Blunt's life fr. An Opportunity Lost Anthony Blunt (1907-1983) deserves a longish footnote in the history of modern Britain. Son of a low-Church clergyman, educated in a British "public" (i.e. private) school, he rose to the very heights of British academia, as an art historian, apparently mainly by dint of high intelligence, talent, and hard work. One of the Cambridge group of young Communists in t. Not a man to know . The book is well-written, but Blunt and his circle are very"precious" in their interests and relationships. It is rather like reading about a curious creature than about someone you would have enjoyed knowing. He was a warped man, not a sympathetic character at all. This book would be "way down" on the list of interesting biographies to read.