BIOGRAPHY

Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives. Originally published in 2001, this comprehensively informed, smartly written biography tells the believe-it-or-not tale of the Cambridge graduate, distinguished art scholar, royal courtier, and not-entirely-closeted gay who spied for the Russians, then was stripped of his knighthood when Margaret Thatcher blew the whistle on the deepest and darkest of his secret lives. Carter brings off the near-miracle of being just sympathetic enough–Blunt was a genuinely tortured soul–without falling into the fatal mistake of whitewashing the evil that he did. Engrossing, enthralling, horrifying (TT).