The best account of the mentality of the upper-caste British traitor is by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in his essay "Collector's Item": "The Communist Party is just another Apostles, a sort of frat, and it preaches brotherhood. And in a while . . . you are asked to do a job, nothing big, but faintly foul." 

As for Blunt's scholarship, the French art historian Marc Fumaroli undermined much of his work on Poussin, but do not expect the British to admit it.

For the record we turned the journalist down but let him use the lavatory. Naturally the quasi-royal personage went unpunished. Personally I would like to have seen him exiled to Russia, to curate a collection of the socialist realism paintings he had once championed. But then, as many a British art worthy has since insisted, given his personal circumstances and the history of the time, we could all have been Blunts. Or, by the same logic, Hitlers or Genghis Khans.

As obvious members of the Ravenscourt ring our own punishment would have been death by tabloid innuendo. This I avoided by ensuring that the red boxes dispatched to me in the late evenings were discreetly delivered, and by smuggling them out in the mornings under a coat. Strangely, they never got us.