Professor Sir Anthony

Professor Sir Anthony is the third novel by British author Alan Halliday, inspired by his time as an art history student at the Courtauld Institute in the early 1970s, when its Director was the notorious spy Sir Anthony Blunt.A corollary to Halliday's acclaimed first novel Tante Brutus (2024), this darkly comic psychological drama reverses the earlier power dynamic, focusing on the dangerous relationship between an older man, Blunt and a young French art student, Miss Hyslop. Drawn into a Faustian bargain, she agrees to serve Blunt exclusively in exchange for academic advancement and social elevation, fully aware of his double life as a traitor whose betrayals cost many lives.When she attempts to escape his control, Blunt's reach proves far longer and more sinister, than she imagined. What follows is a tense struggle for freedom that leads to an unexpected and startling conclusion.Written in Halliday's characteristically witty and incisive style, Professor Sir Anthony is a compulsive page-turner where historical fact and fictional imagination collide with unsettling intensity. Read more