The Untouchable
Book description
'The Untouchable is an engrossing, exquisitely written and almost bewilderingly smart book . . . It's the fullest book I've read in a very long time, utterly accomplished, thoroughly readable, written by a novelist of vast talent' Richard Ford
Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After the announcement in the Commons…
Why read it?
2 authors picked The Untouchable as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
John Banville is a famously prolific author, but his 1997 novel, The Untouchable, is unique in that it’s based on a real-life figure.
Anthony Blunt—who would later be exposed as one of the notorious Cambridge spies—rose to become an art expert to the Queen, even as he funneled purloined secrets to the highest reaches of the Kremlin.
In The Untouchable, we follow Blunt’s fictional counterpart, Victor Maskell, from his poor Irish upbringing and conversion to Marxism at Cambridge, to his efforts on behalf of the Soviet Union well into the Cold War.
Victor’s first-person account—a miracle of authorly ventriloquism for…
From Lee's list on the Cold War told in the first person.
John Banville is one of the finest writers in English alive today. It’s as simple as that. He is also one of the most versatile. Anyone who has read his impressionistic Booker Prizewinning novel The Sea will be startled to read The Untouchable, in which the author contrives to worm his way inside the minds of those famous traitors of the Cold War, the Cambridge spies. In the real world they included such figures as the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir (later stripped of his title) Anthony Blunt and the drunken diplomat Guy Burgess. Here they live again…
From Simon's list on or around the Cold War from a child of the Cold War.
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