CONSPIRACY OF SILENCEThe Secret Life of Anthony...

CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt

by Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman (Vintage Books: $10.95) In November, 1979, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher revealed to an astounded House of Commons that Sir Anthony Blunt, former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and former agent of MI5, a division of Britain’s Security Services (1940-45), had confessed to being a spy for the Soviet Union since the 1930s. In fact, he had confessed his treason in 1964 and been allowed to continue working for the Royal Family for 15 years.

Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, both senior writers for the Sunday Times of London, devote ample attention to Cambridge in the 1930s, where Blunt became a Marxist along with classmates and close friends Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby (who all eventually defected to Moscow). They chronicle Blunt’s work for Soviet Intelligence as a “talent spotter” while a don at Cambridge, his years with MI5, his homosexuality (with a taste for “rough trade”), his distinguished career as an art historian, to his last years of disgrace, stripped of knighthood and forced to resign from his academic post.

“Conspiracy of Silence” is in essence a strong indictment of the British Security Services, calling for “American-style accountability.”

ALMOST AT THE END

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko ; translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis, Albert C. Todd

and Yevgeny Yevtushenko ; foreword by Harrison E. Salisbury (An Owl Book / Henry Holt: $8.95) The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has been a critical voice from within the Soviet system, speaking out against Stalin, against Babi Yar and anti-Semitism, and as Harrison Salisbury writes in his foreword, “against the censors and against shackles on Russian writers in the days before their cause became a chorus of protest from abroad.”

“What kind of courage is it,” Yevtushenko writes in this collection, “to turn all the blank spots on the map of the world / into bloodstains?”

He writes with a refreshing frankness, even as he recounts how a group of American students in St. Paul, Minn., attacked and beat him when he read his poetry in 1972. “Almost at the End” is, in Salisbury’s words, “an act of courage” written by “a man of passion.”

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

A Life . . . A Love Story

by Claude Francis

and Fernande Gontier ;

translated from the French by Lisa Nesselson (St. Martin’s Press: $12.95) Francis and Gontier take an unexpected approach to the life of the nonconformist, novelist and feminist. Rather than retread De Beauvoir’s own autobiography, they focus on her lifelong partnership with, and love for, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. “Their love withstood the test of time, upholding a hard-won individuality, a romantic morality as complex as their individual temperaments. A privileged love.”

But this “privileged love” could accommodate so-called “contingent loves” as well. As Francis and Gautier put it, these contingent loves “might even be veritable passions, without . . . altering the essential bond that held (Sartre and De Beauvoir) together.”

One such “contingent love” was “the point of departure for this biography,” the authors tell us, their “tracking down of the handwritten, unpublished letters (1,442 pages) that Simone de Beauvoir wrote to the American author Nelson Algren, with whom she had fallen in love.” De Beauvoir’s letters to Algren, in the authors’ view, convey a vital emotional element that her autobiography lacks: “a passion, the thoughts of a writer who allowed her pen to wander where her heart led it.”

ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

The Ordeal of Intellectuals in

China’s Great Cultural Revolution

by Anne F. Thurston (Harvard University Press: $10.95) “As an episode in the history of man’s inhumanity to man,” Anne Thurston writes, “China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is surpassed only by the Nazi Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, and the recent genocide in Cambodia.”

Begun by Mao Tse-tung in 1966 and lasting until his death in 1976, this decade of terror claimed as its victims a tenth of the population--alleged “bourgeois” academics and intellectuals, but also members of the Communist Party itself. In all, 1 million people died.

“Enemies of the People” is the testimony of survivors whom Thurston interviewed in 1981-82, many of whom spoke to her at “potentially serious personal risk.” Their stories tell of personal humiliation, of being put on display before a jeering, taunting audience, of being tortured and left for dead, of family members publicly denouncing one another.

THE COLOR OF BLOOD

by Brian Moore (A William Abraham Book/

Dutton Obelisk: $7.95) After an attempt is made on his life, Stephen Cardinal Bem, chief prelate in a small Eastern European country, is abducted by four men claiming to represent the Internal Secret Police.

In fact, his keepers are themselves Catholic priests belonging to a right-wing faction of the church who are trying to instigate insurrection against the totalitarian regime under which they live.

Years back, Cardinal Bem had struck a deal with the nation’s prime minister that would allow the church “to have a say in its own affairs.” But some of his own colleagues accuse him of being “a collaborator with this godless regime.” And they’re willing to risk their own eternal damnation.