To the Editor:
In “The Forger and the Spy” [May], Igor Golomstock states that Anthony Blunt “end[ed] his days peacefully, still a member of the Royal Academy and of King’s College, Cambridge.” Actually, Blunt, like the other Cambridge spies—Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby—attended Cambridge’s Trinity College. And after his treason was publicly revealed and he had been stripped of his knighthood, Blunt resigned from the British Academy—just as a motion was passed to expel him. Interestingly, Noel Annan, then vice-chancellor of the University of London, reports in his book, Our Age: English Intellectuals Between the World Wars, that when he was asked to move that Blunt be deprived of the title of emeritus professor, he “refused on the ground that to do so would make Blunt into the kind of nonperson that the old-guard Communists in the Soviet Union became after Stalin liquidated them.”
Mr. Golomstock’s withering exposure of Blunt’s professional incompetence in his chosen field of study, the art of Nicolas Poussin, should be a salutary corrective to his inflated scholarly status. Blunt deceived not only his country but his profession. How, one wonders, could fellow scholars persist in such willing suspension of disbelief for so long? One is used to the Old Boy Network as a protective shield for errant social and political conduct, but scarcely as a cover for spurious scholarship.
Anand Chandavarkar
Washington, D.C.
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