|
Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907 – 26 March 1983),〔GRO Register of Deaths: MAR 1983 15 2186 WESTMINSTER – Anthony Frederick Blunt, DoB = 26 September 1907; Varriano 1996.〕 known as Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO, from 1956 to 1979, was a leading British art historian who in 1964, after being offered immunity from prosecution, confessed to having been a Soviet spy. A closely held secret for many years, his status was revealed publicly by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979, and he was stripped of his knighthood immediately thereafter. Blunt was Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. He was exposed as a member of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to at least the early 1950s. ==Early life== Blunt was born in Bournemouth, Hampshire, the third and youngest son of a vicar, the Revd (Arthur) Stanley Vaughan Blunt (1870–1929), and his wife, Hilda Violet (1880–1969), daughter of Henry Master of the Madras civil service. He was the brother of writer Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt and of numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt, and the grandnephew of poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. He was a third cousin of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the late Queen Mother: his mother was the second cousin of Elizabeth's father Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. On occasions, Blunt and his two brothers, Christopher and Wilfrid, took afternoon tea at the Bowes-Lyon's London home in Bruton Street, Mayfair. Blunt's vicar father was assigned to Paris with the British embassy chapel, and so moved his family to the French capital for several years during Blunt's childhood. The young Anthony became fluent in French, and experienced intensely the artistic culture closely available to him, stimulating an interest which would last a lifetime and form the basis for his later career. He was educated at Marlborough College, where he joined the college's secret 'Society of Amici', in which he was a contemporary of Louis MacNeice (whose unfinished autobiography ''The Strings are False'' contains numerous references to Blunt), John Betjeman and Graham Shepard. He was remembered by historian John Edward Bowle, a year ahead of Blunt at Marlborough, as an intellectual prig, too preoccupied with the realm of ideas. He thought Blunt had too much ink in his veins and belonged to a world of rather prissy, cold-blooded, academic puritanism.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Anthony Blunt」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|