Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907, Bournemouth, Hampshire – 26 March 1983, Westminster, London), known as Sir Anthony Blunt, a Knight Commander of Victorian Order between 1956 and 1979, [an] art historian, Professor of the History of Art, University of London and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (1947-74). Blunt was an acclaimed art critic and the Fourth Man of the Cambridge Five, a group of traitors and spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to the early 1950s.
A manuscript currently kept under lock and key in the British Library, closed to the public until around 2009, may or may not shed light on one of the most sphinx-like figures of the British arts establishment. The document, an unfinished memoir by the art-historian Anthony Blunt, was deposited in the British library in 1987, four years after the author's death. It was written as an apologia, just after Blunt's public exposure as a Soviet spy by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
