Blunt Speaking

In the second year of our degree course at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1948, we were introduced to the heady experience of tutorials with the senior staff. A small group of us would assemble regularly at 20, Portman Square, in the palatial study of the Institute's new and relatively young Director, Professor Anthony Blunt. Van Gogh's self-portrait with the bandage over his freshly amputated ear hung just inside the door.

I was the only one in my year to have come to university straight from school. All the others had several years of wartime work behind them, constituting a lifetime of greater maturity. At our first session the Director asked each of us whether we had yet chosen our period for special study. First to be asked was a petite, dark haired lady with an air of enviable sophistication. She declared that she was thinking of becoming a medievalist.