Anthony Blunt

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Anthony Frederick Blunt (26 September 1907 – 26 March 1983), styled Sir Anthony Blunt from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy.

Blunt was a professor of art history at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work ''Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700'', first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition (in a version slightly revised by Richard Beresford) in 1999, at which time it was still considered the best account of the subject.

In 1964, after being offered immunity from prosecution, Blunt confessed to having been a spy for the Soviet Union. He was considered to be the "fourth man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of Cambridge-educated spies who worked for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to at least the early 1950s. He was the fourth member of the group to be discovered; the fifth, John Cairncross, was yet to be revealed. The height of Blunt's espionage activity was during World War II, when he passed to the Soviets intelligence about Wehrmacht plans that the British government had decided to withhold from its ally. His confession—a closely guarded secret for years—was revealed publicly by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979. He was stripped of his knighthood immediately thereafter. Blunt had already been exposed in print by historian Andrew Boyle earlier that year.