Read on Twitter
Today I finished Raymond Postgate& #39;s *The Ledger is Kept* (1953), a rather obscure novel which is fairly unremarkable except for one strange historical context...
The novel is partially about the search for a Russian spy at a British scientific research station. The spy is pretty easily spotted for any post-1960s readers, because it& #39;s a chap called Blunt who gets into an argument about art during a lengthy Oxbridge flashback sequence.
At first I thought that it was sort of funny how the twist in Postgate& #39;s novel had been rendered strikingly obvious by later political events. But then I checked the timeline on the Anthony Blunt case...
While Anthony Blunt& #39;s identity as a spy didn& #39;t become public until a couple of decades after *The Ledger is Kept*, there were rumours circulating in Communist circles as early as 1950, three years before the novel.
Postgate was involved with the Communist Party in the 1920s and 30s. So here& #39;s the question: is his fictional Russian spy Oxbridge art-critic Blunt a total coincidence, or some kind of inside joke that unexpectedly went public a few decades later?
