One of his more engaging characteristics is his love of art and poetry, not something one could say of many of Her Majesty’s diplomats today. He is forever knocking off stanzas, some of them repeated here. On waking up opposite the marvellous ruins of Baalbek, for example, ‘I drew furiously and of course broke into verse.’ It is a typical reaction and, what- ever one thinks of the poetry, one warms to him greatly for it.
As a literary critic, however, he is not always up to the mark. He admires a letter from a friend’s wife who wrote him a descriptive passage about New York in 1968, concluding with the sentence, ‘It’s all geometric shapes and sharp angles, except for the wonderful arching bridges suspended from the sky, and the curves of niggers in hats leaning against things.’ ‘What wouldn’t I give,’ he asks himself, ‘to be able to write anything as good as that last sentence (though I wouldn’t have used the word “niggers”)?’ It seems a perfectly ordinary sentence.
Justin Marozzi is looking for a bold publisher for Islamistan, a satirical novel about Iraq: jsmarozzi@aol.com
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