Today I finished Raymond Postgate'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'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'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's identity as a spy didn'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'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?

I genuinely don't know; as a Victorianist this is somewhat outside my historical period. But a quick Google suggests that this hasn't been commented on *at all*; maybe Postgate's novel had sunk into complete obscurity by the time the Blunt case became public.