Lees-Milne is always fascinated to encounter living links with the past. In 1942 he meets the 85-year-old Reginald Blunt, a Chelsea writer who had known Thomas and Jane Carlyle (she died in 1866) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose language was ‘appalling’. In 1945 he attends a lecture by Sir Sydney Cockerell; he had been secretary to William Morris, who ‘had fits of violent rage, once tearing his own clothes to ribbons’. In 1949, at the house of the American artist Ethel Sands, he is introduced to Prince Antoine Bibesco:
He is oldish, with straight, thick grey hair. He is the man Proust loved and the widower of Elizabeth Asquith [daughter of the prime minister]. Abounding in charm and I would guess the cause of havoc in many hearts of yore.
It all savours of ‘I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.’ Of course royalty ranks high among living links with the past. When, in 1948, Lady Crewe says to the Queen (the present Queen’s mother), ‘And you won’t know Mr Lees-Milne, of course’, the diarist gives her high marks for replying, ‘Yes indeed’ — ‘with marked emphasis on the last syllable’.
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