[5] 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.

The height of Blunt's espionage activity was during the Second World War, when he passed to the Soviets intelligence about Wehrmacht plans that the British government had decided to withhold.

He was 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.

[8] Blunt's father was assigned to Paris with the British embassy chapel and moved his family to the French capital for several years during Anthony's childhood.

Blunt became fluent in French and intensely experienced the artistic culture available to him in Paris, stimulating an interest which lasted a lifetime and formed the basis for his later career.

There he joined the college's secret "Society of Amici",[10] 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."

[28] After the war, Blunt's espionage activity diminished, but he retained contact with Soviet agents and continued to pass them gossip from former MI5 colleagues and documents from Burgess.

"[38] Much later, Queen Victoria's letters were edited and published in five volumes by Roger Fulford, and it was revealed they contained numerous "embarrassing and 'improper' comments about the awfulness of German politics and culture.

[41] The King had good reason to worry about the safety of the objects he had sent Blunt to retrieve: the senior American officers at Friedrichshof Castle, Kathleen Nash and Jack Durant, were later arrested for looting and put on trial.

Blunt was greatly distressed by Burgess' flight and, on 28 May 1951, confided in his friend Goronwy Rees, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who had briefly supplied the NKVD with political information in 1938–39.

Rees suggested that Burgess had defected because of his virulent anti-Americanism and belief that the United States would involve Britain in a Third World War, and that he was a Soviet agent.

[45] Blunt also named Cairncross, Jenifer Hart, Phoebe Pool, Peter Ashby, Brian Simon and Leonard Henry Long as spies.

[46] According to his obituary in The New York Times,[47] Blunt acknowledged that he had recruited spies for the Soviets from among young radical students at Cambridge, passed information to the Russians while he served as a high-ranking British intelligence officer during World War II and had helped two of his former Cambridge students who had become Soviet moles, Burgess and Maclean, escape in 1951 just as their activities were about to be exposed.

"[58] On 15 November 1979, Thatcher revealed Blunt's wartime role to the House of Commons in reply to questions put to her by Ted Leadbitter, MP for Hartlepool, and Dennis Skinner, MP for Bolsover:[59] Mr. Leadbitter and Mr. Skinner: Asked the Prime Minister if she will make a statement on recent evidence concerning the actions of an individual, whose name has been supplied to her, in relation to the security of the United Kingdom.

"[59]In a statement to the press on 20 November, Blunt claimed the decision to grant him immunity from prosecution was taken by the then-prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

His former pupil, art critic Brian Sewell, said at the time, "He was so businesslike about it; he considered the implications for his knighthood and academic honours and what should be resigned and what retained.

Jon Nordheimer, the author of his obituary in The New York Times, wrote: "Details of the nature of the espionage carried out by Mr. Blunt for the Russians have never been revealed, although it is believed that they did not directly cause loss of life or compromise military operations.

He held the position for 27 years, was knighted as a KCVO in 1956 for his work in the role, and his contribution was vital in the expansion of the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace, which opened in 1962, and organising the cataloguing of the collection.

[9] After Margaret Thatcher had exposed Blunt's espionage, he continued his art history work by writing and publishing a Guide to Baroque Rome (1982).

Merz published a book, Pietro da Cortona and Roman Baroque Architecture in 2008 incorporating a draft by the late Anthony Blunt.

Among his many accomplishments, Blunt also received a series of honorary fellowships, became the National Trust's picture adviser, curated exhibitions at the Royal Academy, edited and wrote numerous books and articles, and sat on many influential committees in the arts.

A festschrift, Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art presented to Anthony Blunt on his 60th Birthday, Phaidon 1967 (introduction by Ellis Waterhouse), contains a full list of his writings up to 1966.

Major works include: Important articles after 1966: A Question of Attribution is a play written by Alan Bennett about Blunt, covering the weeks before his public exposure as a spy, and his relationship with Queen Elizabeth II.

After a successful run in London's West End, it was made into a television play directed by John Schlesinger and starring James Fox, Prunella Scales and Geoffrey Palmer.

Blunt: The Fourth Man is a 1985 television film starring Ian Richardson, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Williams, and Rosie Kerslake, covering the events of 1951 when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean went missing.

A Friendship of Convenience: Being a Discourse on Poussin's "Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake", is a 1997 novel by Rufus Gunn set in 1956 in which Blunt, then Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, encounters Joseph Losey, the film director fleeing McCarthyism.

Liberation Square, Gareth Rubin's alternative history of the UK, published in 2019, makes Blunt First Party Secretary of a 1950s Britain divided by US and Russian forces.

[84][85] Blunt is portrayed by Nicholas Rowe in the 2022 ITVX miniseries A Spy Among Friends, an espionage drama based on Ben Macintyre's book of the same name.

Anthony Quayle played Herbert Glanville, an art critic dubbed the Fifth Man of a Cambridge spy ring who made a deal to get immunity from prosecution.