Free Republic

Disbelief is the instinctive reaction to the double life of Anthony Blunt. One of the sons of the quite conventional chaplain of the embassy church in Paris. Attentive to his mother. Marlborough and Cambridge. Frequent long spells in France and Germany, fluent in the languages. Art historian and homosexual. Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, a natural for the Queen Mother’s circle. This is close to a novelist’s parody of a certain sort of highbrow career. And then betrayer of all that reassuring English stuff in favor of Stalin, foulest of murderers. The man, the Establishment he adorned, the country in...

He would have liked the Washington Post headline: Michael Straight dies; Magazine editor, NEA official Yawn. On to the next page. Straight was a mediocre editor of the family mag, The New Republic, and it’s doubtful whether anyone other than fellow arts bureaucrats wants to read of his service as Deputy Assistant Associate Whatever at the National Endowment for the Arts. Michael Whitney Straight led a long, comfortable, undistinguished life as the sort of chap who turns up in the index of other people’s biographies as the third fellow on the left in the picture of the committee meeting or...