Anthony Blunt (HB) by Miranda Carter
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.
Miranda Carter was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School and Exeter College, Oxford. She worked as a publisher and journalist before beginning research on her biography of Anthony Blunt in 1994. She lives in London with her husband and two sons. Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001), her first book, won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Orwell Prize, and was shortlisted for many other prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Biography Award. In the US it was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the seven best books of 2002. Miranda Carter is currently at work on a book about George V, Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas II and the First World War.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780333633502 |
| ISBN 10 | 0333633504 |
| Title | Anthony Blunt (HB) |
| Author | Miranda Carter |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Pan Macmillan |
| Year published | 2001-11-09 |
| Number of pages | 608 |
| Prizes | Winner of George Orwell Prize 2002, Winner of Orwell Prize 2002, Short-listed for Whitbread Book Awards: Biography Category 2002, Short-listed for James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Biography) 2002, Short-listed for CWA Macallan Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2002, Short-listed for Whitbread Prize (Biography) 2002, Short-listed for Guardian First Book Award 2001 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |