Blunt memoir reveals regret at spying

Posthumously released memoirs by Anthony Blunt have revealed his regret at his involvement in Britain’s most notorious spy scandal as the "biggest mistake of my life". The MI5 wartime agent writes that he even considered suicide after he was exposed for his role in passing British secrets to the Soviets.

Blunt, a highly respected art historian and former Queen's Surveyor of Pictures who was unmasked by Margaret Thatcher as a wartime spy, was the "fourth man" of the notorious Cambridge spy ring. In the biggest security scandal of the 20th-century, the group handed on state secrets to Communist Russia during WWII and into the 1950s. Blunt's 30,000-word account, written after he was exposed in 1979, is published today by the British Library, 25 years after his death as he requested.

Blunt, who became director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1947, was exposed as a Soviet agent in Andrew Boyle's 1979 book, Climate of Treason about the 'fourth man' in the spy ring. The three other members, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, had already been exposed and defected to the Soviet Union.

Boyle's book did not even name Blunt - the spy was called Maurice, after EM Forster's homosexual academic. But Blunt's legal attempts to get the book blocked linked him to the story. In 1979 he was publicly named as the fourth man by the new prime minister Margaret Thatcher and stripped of his knighthood.

In the memoirs, Blunt, by then an old man, writes of his guilt at becoming involved in what he called the "Russian nightmare". He reveals that after the "appalling shock" of his public exposure, he says he considered taking his own life but decided that it was the "cowardly solution". Instead, he sought refuge in "whisky and concentrated work" - and wrote a number of art books.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING
Michael White, the Guardian: "[The] extracts remind me of what I felt at the time: Blunt's lack of remorse for the deaths of British agents and others that his treachery must have caused; his arrogance: his willingness to retain his perks and privileges (with the immunity granted on advice of the security services, which it suited) as long as the affair remained silent; the pettiness of the authorities that did not send him to jail but took away that knighthood (for services to art history) once the rest of us found out."

Ben Macintyre, the Times: "Anthony Blunt's memoir is an astonishing revelation, but also a posthumous tweaking of history by a man who spent his entire adult life deceiving and dissembling... Blunt emerges from this brief, self-justifying memoir as a deeply flawed and complex character, regretful not for the dubious nature of his actions but for the trouble he caused himself." ·