Anthony Blunt appears in all three novels in the trilogy and is central in the fourth. When James Harcourt-Heath met him, Blunt was about three years older, a graduate student, and a Modern Languages tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Blunt was a leading light in the Apostles, a secret Cambridge society that remains active today. In the mid-1930s, members were primarily undergraduates from King’s and Trinity colleges and were purported to be Marxists. Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Leo Long, Donald Maclean, and John Astbury were active members, all eventually securing sensitive jobs within the British Secret Service. Burgess became an MI6 officer, and Maclean worked for the Foreign Office.
Harold Adrian Russell ‘Kim’ Philby was also a Trinity College student who received his degree in 1933. He was a close friend of Guy Burgess and, by 1941, held a senior post within MI6. In April 2016, a film was released from Russian Stasi files in which Burgess told the audience he found it a simple matter to filch SIS documents. He simply put them in his briefcase and walked out the front door of Broadway Buildings, the MI6 offices in London. The following morning, he would return the files after accomplices had copied and photographed the pages. This went on throughout WWII and continued during the 1950s Cold War period.
All those identified above were eventually exposed as Soviet agents. Burgess and Maclean fled to the Soviet Union in 1951, and Philby defected in 1963. They became what is known today as the Cambridge Five.
Anthony Blunt came under MI5 scrutiny in the early 1950s. Despite that, in 1956, he was given a knighthood. In 1963, he was exposed as a Soviet spy by the American and former Apostle Michael Straight. A year later, Blunt confessed and implicated John Cairncross, Peter Ashby, Brian Symon, and his former lover, Leo Long. In exchange for his confession and giving up his traitorous associates, Blunt’s lawyers successfully negotiated immunity from prosecution for fifteen years.
When that agreement expired in 1979, the Thatcher government released details of his career as a Soviet spy. This became an overnight press sensation, and the British Secret Service became the butt of jokes for their incompetence. Blunt died of a heart attack in 1983.