The art historian spy

It's easy to see why biographers are drawn to Anthony Blunt. He's something of a challenge, as Miranda Carter acknowledges in the title of her tremendous book.

An acclaimed art historian, the director of the Courtauld Institute and surveyor of the Queen's pictures, Blunt was publicly exposed in 1979 as a Russian spy during the Second World War and a sometime Stalinist talent scout.

Unlike John Costello's 1988 biography Mask of Treachery (subtitled Lies, Spies, Buggery and Betrayal), or Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman's Conspiracy of Silence from the year before, His Lives is a clear-eyed character study with no capitalist or homophobic drum to bang.

Carter easily matches Blunt's stern mysteriousness with a steely dispassion of her own that yields convincing results.

And if their combined intellectual rigour never makes for a sparky read, exactly, it's never less than completely absorbing.