Fascinated by others’ foibles and failings, Lees-Milne is also extremely candid about his own. He constantly acknowledges his impatience and intolerance, his loathing of the modern world, frankly asserting his admiration for the old-established upper classes:

I have come to the conclusion that the aristocracy have always been shits, and that in my youth I was too beguiled by them. Nevertheless, I still maintain that the decent and educated ones attain a standard of well-being and good-doing which has never been transcended by any other class in the world.
Interested in his friends’ sex lives, he reflects analytically upon his own, up to now predominantly homosexual nature:
In the train, I thought how curious it was that I, as an old eunuch, am now totally heterosexual … I suppose that, by a tilt of the scales … I would have been wholly ‘normal’ from adolescence onwards. Perhaps it is just as well that this was not the case, as I would probably have been a nasty, intolerant, anti-queer young fogey.
Crotchety, yet spirited and endearing, as well as frequently very funny, James Lees-Milne, despite constant complaints, kept up an unusually busy social life to the end of his days. His last visit to London was made only weeks before his death. ‘I fear I can never go to London again,’ he writes on returning home. ‘Just not up to it. Found the weight of my rolled umbrella and overcoat almost too much for my feeble shoulders and stick-like arms.’ It is with a real sense of loss that one reads the editor’s two brief sentences recording the final silencing of that distinctive voice, on 28 December 1997.

James Lees-Milne is without question one of the finest diarists of the 20th century, and Michael Bloch has been an exemplary editor of the last three volumes. In the interesting position of close personal friend as well as editor, Bloch is also writing Lees-Milne’s biography, a work which promises to be of consuming interest to all the great man’s admirers.

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