Disbelief is the instinctive reaction to the double life of
Anthony Blunt. One of the sons of the quite conventional
chaplain of the embassy church in Paris. Attentive to his
mother. Marlborough and Cambridge. Frequent long spells in
France and Germany, fluent in the languages. Art historian and
homosexual. Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, a natural for the
Queen Mother’s circle. This is close to a novelist’s parody of a
certain sort of highbrow career. And then betrayer of all that
reassuring English stuff in favor of Stalin, foulest of
murderers. The man, the Establishment he adorned, the country in
which he was so eminent, dissolve into unreality. It seems
simply too Jekyll and Hyde to be true.
Cyril Connolly once categorized Cambridge intellectuals as “cold
radiator types,” and those who knew Blunt affirm that he was the
very coldest of radiators. Aloof, supercilious, arrogant,
snobbish, priestly are among the adjectives he habitually
attracted. He seemed to be consciously holding himself together,
and at the same time apart. There were nevertheless people who
liked him. Serious people too, drawn from the charmed circle
where British public opinion forms and then congeals into dogma,
for instance the poet Louis MacNeice, the art historian Ellis
Waterhouse, the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, Cambridge academics
like Dadie Rylands and John Hilton, and Lord and Lady Rothschild,
heads of a family
