John F. Burns reports in the New York Times on the release of Anthony Blunt’s memoir of his spying activities in Britain. Recruited from Cambridge by Guy Burgess during the hothouse years of the 1930s, Blunt was eventually unmasked despite having earned immunity through cooperation.
The memoir also discloses that Blunt contemplated suicide when he learned in the 1970s that he might have been exposed. Mrs. Thatcher’s statement on his spying caused him to be dismissed from his job as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures — curator of the royal art collection — and stripped of the knighthood conferred on him for his service to the monarchy. He was best known among art scholars as an expert on the French 17th-century classical painter Nicolas Poussin.
Memoirs of British Spy Offer No Apology (New York Times)
