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“... possibly by Ludwik, the third of these Soviet spies, who probably recruited Kim Philby, to Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Philby dropped all his communist contacts and joined the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship, which made it easier for him to get access to Franco’s forces in Spain as a ‘journalist’. Berzin and Ludwik were ...”

“... nicer than I actually find it, which is rather routine, but some of the most memorable passages in Anthony Powell’s Journals and James Lees-Milne’s Diaries are to do with meals, particularly with Lees-Milne’s meals during the war or the years of austerity. Somewhere he talks about a pudding of treacle pancakes and cream which even now makes my mouth ...”

“... certainly the fixer, of modern camp’, as Brophy wrote in her book about him, Prancing Novelist). Anthony Blunt, a friend of Brophy and Levey’s, inspired the headmistress, because Brophy found his relationship with his besotted vice-director amusing. She changed his gender since ‘it would have been very hard to create a scandal’ with a woman and a ...”

“... for instance, though nothing quite so unexpected as a presentation copy of some art book signed by Anthony Blunt that turned up round the corner in Age Concern.15 September. Much missed these shameful days is Tom Bingham, the ex-lord chief justice and legal philosopher, who would have had Johnson scuttling for cover. Both from Balliol, one a credit to the ...”

“... was ‘wrong’ about evolution – strike a large and hitherto unrepresented constituency as blunt truth from a plain-speaking man. If he loses, it may be precisely because his advisers tied a knot in that freewheeling, happy-go-lucky tongue. But what of the intellectual motor which powers it? There the evidence is rather more skimpy. Reagan partisans ...”

“... not sensitive, but those who write on it often have good cause to be, and prefer to blush unread. Anthony Blunt was quoted in his Times obituary (28 March 1983) as saying that he acted during the war ‘from a conviction that we were not doing enough to help a hard pressed ally’. It is a political if not mathematical certainty that the same men who ...”

“... imagination can make of the plight of the virtuous spy, whether wild or sober, dedicated or not, Blunt or Burgess? There is nothing much here to conflict with the stereotypical idea of the Thirties, the afternoon men in their Soho clubs and hideouts, their lust for working-class boys, their not wonderfully well-informed Marxism, and their easy way of ...”

“... When Anthony Shadid was born in Oklahoma in 1968, the only Lebanese personality most Americans knew was not Lebanese at all. Hans Conried was a comic actor of Austrian Jewish origin, who portrayed the gauche Uncle Tannous (a diminutive of Antonius/Anthony) on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show ...”

“... It is just one fragment among a torrent of primary-source material relentlessly amassed by Anthony Julius in his history of English anti-semitism, gathered both from England and from the wider background of Christian culture in Europe, to which he adds streams of secularism and Islam when his story approaches modern times. The maelstrom of original ...”

“... which, had they known, the tabloids would have had a field day. He also did the best photograph of Anthony Blunt, a real classic.As always, listening to Der Rosenkavalier (from Covent Garden) this evening, I feel that, particularly at the end of Act III, it trembles almost on the edge of music.22 January. Letters continue to flood in after the publication ...”

“... services are governed by two separate obsessions. The discovery of Maclean, Burgess, Philby and Blunt as Soviet agents has produced a long-lasting preoccupation with hunting down moles, ‘agents of influence’ and the like. Newspapers love it, the public are interested, and the whole business is endlessly stoked by the more enfevered spirits of the ...”

“... is very similar to that of a very different kind of MI6 book, from St Antony’s College, Oxford. Anthony Verrier’s Through the Looking-Glass is written with MI6 experience, which is a plus, and is enfeebled by his incapacity to name names and his willingness to act as an apologist for his MI6 friends. These are two large minuses: on Ireland, for ...”

“... home by Tube, whereas after the rigours of Nidderdale I feel I’m entitled to a cab. Still, as Anthony Powell used sometimes to note in his journal, ‘interesting day’. 7 July. The same week as I traipsed across North Yorkshire the Guardian has a piece by Terry Eagleton saying that of all the eminent writers and playwrights only Pinter continues radical ...”

“... the Independent by Charlotte Philby, Kim Philby’s granddaughter, prompted by the publication of Anthony Blunt’s apologia released by the British Library. Not surprisingly she draws an unfavourable comparison between Blunt and Philby, bolstered by happy family pictures of her grandfather in Moscow. There’s not ...”

“... One of Anthony Thwaite’s poems, ‘Tell it slant’, swerves from Emily Dickinson’s line ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant’ to settle upon an aesthetic procedure she would have been too nervous to enunciate: Truth is partial. Name the parts But leave the outline vague and blurred. Dickinson thought the truth should dazzle gradually, and that the best ploy was ‘circuit ...”