blunt 23 July 2009
There’s a lot of talk about spying in the papers today because Anthony Blunt’s memoir has been released. He was the Surveyor of the King’s (and, I suppose, subsequently the Queen’s) Pictures from 1945 but a spy for the Soviets from much earlier in his college days at Cambridge. I often wonder if there were students at Trinity in Dublin (where I ‘read’ my degree) who got the tap on the shoulder – I assume that there were because, for instance, although I was there in, what seemed to be, rubbish years 79 – 83 there’d’ve been a lot of Northern Irelanders also and there was an actual war going on up there, even if we all referred to it as The Troubles….
My lasting memory of the Blunt episode, though, was that my professor Anne Cruickshank (amazing woman and teacher) was emblazoned on the front of all of the papers in Ireland a possible ‘5th Man’ as she was a favourite pupil of Blunt’s – SSOOOOOO exciting
