Title: Anthony Blunt: His Lives Author: Miranda Carter Publisher: Pan Anthony Blunt was one of England's preeminent art historians of the twentieth century. He was also a drinking buddy of the Queen Mum, a colleague of John Maynard Keynes, a second-wave Bloomsbury man, a firm friend of W H Auden, a member of MI5, the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, and a dear homosexual who spent most of his life repressing or compartmentalising his feelings of passion. What rates him highly in my books is that he pissed off the Brits quite properly by also spying for the USSR, and was "outed" by Maggie Thatcher in 1979 and stripped of his knighthood, although his story served useful for the Iron Slag, as the miners' strikes and seventeen percent interest rates were ignored while the nation threw its vitriol at the Queen's queen. Carter's biography is really a manual for how good biographies should be crafted. Combining detailed references with firsthand accounts wherever possible, she's built a work that posits Blunt almost as a metonym for the times he lived in, full of confusion and sexual identity struggle, inspired and educated by the Spanish Civil War and the hope of a new Jerusalem, reveling in art and literature, and left to rot in shame as the market and Thatcher's malice rose to rule the roost. Carter's narrative voice is authoritative without being intrusive, and strikes a gentle balance that whilst never approving of Blunt, never quite condemns him either, instead unfolding a map for readers to see why Blunt took the road he did. In the end, it's difficult to see what the Poms were so upset about - for a third of the time he spied for the Soviets, the UK were their allies whilst the US was busy picking its ass in splendid isolation. Blunt was a man driven by his convictions, but compartmentalised so thoroughly that in the end, no even his judgement and integrity remained.