James Lees-Milne Diaries, 1942-1954 | abridged and introduced by Michael Bloch

Quite often Lees-Milne is relaying the wit of others. In 1942 Winston Churchill’s niece Clarissa, who later married Anthony Eden, told him that General Pope-Hennessy (‘Jamesy’s’ father) had died after a seizure brought on by his rage at some colonel’s assertion that Russian tanks were bad. She added that Cecil Beaton had commented (enlisting a wartime slogan), ‘Careless talk costs lives.’ In 1944 Lees-Milne recalls Lord Berners’s definition of Sibyl Colefax’s and Emerald Cunard’s parties: ‘The first was a party of lunatics presided over by an efficient trained hospital nurse, the second a party of lunatics presided over by a lunatic.’ His boss Lord Esher steadfastly called him Lees-Milne. ‘ “If we were on Christian name terms,” he said, “it would be awkward if I had to sack you.” ’

The aesthete Lees-Milne could be very tough when he chose. Every few pages there is a glint of steel. In 1942, when the former prime minister Lloyd George announces that he does not give a damn about the Queen Anne house of Bradbourne, Kent, ‘or for any country house for that matter’, Lees-Milne ‘cast such intense looks of hatred and indignation at him that he was obliged to notice them’. The same year, he is ‘livid with rage’ when he sees William IV railings being removed from outside Brooks’s Club to help the war effort; he sends furious telegrams to the club secretary, to Lord Ilchester and to the architect Professor Albert Richardson. In 1943 he is thrown into ‘a paroxysm of rage’ by the news that Rome has been bombed. In March 1945 he is furious when Lord Margesson (formerly Secretary of State for War) quotes Churchill as claiming that the Polish settlement was wise and beneficent. ‘Red in the face, I exclaimed, “Beneficent, my foot! Expedient doubtless …” ’ In his National Trust job, too, he made his views forcefully clear. He was dead against the ‘museum- isation’ of country houses. In 1946, accompanied by Sir George Mallaby, he had an interview with a Ministry of Works official called Robinson.