[Review] Miranda Carter: 'Anthony Blunt: His Lives'

Anthony Blunt (1907-1983). Art historian, spy and traitor. He was educated at Marlborough College, where he transformed himself into an aesthete, at first simply to antagonize his tutors, but it was a guise that perfectly suited his personality.

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Long before the start of the Second World War, English universities offered fertile grounds for Marxism. The 'intellectuals' saw Marxism as a grand social experiment and that appealed to their attitude of being for something where everybody else was against. Cambridge University was the birthplace of the so-called Cambridge Five, a loose group of spies that consisted of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, and Anthony Blunt.

Searching for a reason, most of his friends would later argue that the Depression in the 30s and the advent of fascism made communism fashionable among left-leaning intellectuals. While this might have been true for most of them, I wonder if it would have been the ultimate reason for Anthony Blunt.

Blunt never felt really at home in social situations and behaved awkwardly, sometimes to the point of being abusive. From a young age, he was known to be a homosexual, something that was still illegal in those early days. One has to simply remember the torment of Alan Turing had to endure to understand that it was a wise course of action to create secret societies, where only like-minded members would attend. Apparently, secrecy was also a facet of his personality.

While reading the immensely thoughtful biography of Anthony Blunt by Miranda Carter, I increasingly got the growing feeling that Blunt was possibly autistic. Blunt once proclaimed that he liked things more than people (p.33). He feared loss of control (p. 88) and had rigid feelings about his chosen subjects. His enduring social awkwardness is also one of the major symptoms of an autistic disorder.

Anthony Blunt may not even have known himself why he became a traitor, but I would argue that he would have found it simply an entertaining idea that he'd belong to a select group of people. It would also appeal to his need to seek danger as in later life he would also be in search of liaisons dangereuses with sailors and dock workers.

Even after almost 600 pages of painstaking research and exquisite writing by Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt remains an enigmatic and elusive figure. Or maybe he is more is like a Russian matryoshka doll.

Highly recommended. Buy the book here.