Unsympathetic reviewers of Lees-Milne — one of whom described him as ‘queeny’ — accuse him of racism and snobbery. I’m afraid he was guilty of both, and the same kinds of allowances have to be made for him (if they can be made at all) as are made for T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Philip Larkin and Evelyn Waugh, who tended to refer to ‘blackamoors’, a word only found today in auction catalogues in relation to carved wooden figures. So we find ‘thick ugly Yiddish lips’ in an entry of 1942; and, in 1946: ‘The Japanese have no redeeming qualities — not even good looks.’ Bernard Berenson is ‘a vain Jew’. The diarist’s dislike of Ireland and Irish Catholics is ‘almost intuitive, certainly temperamental and racial’. During the war, a number of his friends express pro-Nazi views, notably his Eton crush Tom Mitford and Mitford’s brother-in-law Derek Jackson, who married Pamela Mitford — the man who once retorted to someone who referred to himself as ‘we’, ‘Is that the royal we, the editorial we, or just you and your tapeworm?’ In 1944 Lees-Milne is ‘pretty certain’ that it will not matter in 50 years’ time who has won the war. In 1947, after attending a West End play about ‘the Negro problem in the Southern states’, he opines that the black actors in it have had their skins lightened ‘so as to engage our sympathies’.

In one entry, he claims to be ‘not a social snob but an intellectual one’, but that is not quite borne out elsewhere in the diaries. At Anglesey Abbey in 1943, Lord Fairhaven greets him in ‘too immaculate a blue suit’ and is served first at dinner ‘before his guests, in the feudal manner which only the son of an oil magnate would adopt’. Lees-Milne and a woman friend agree that they prefer ‘the company of stupid, well-bred people to that of intelligent, common people’. So much for intellectual snobbery. He often deploys the word ‘bedint’, used by Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West to refer, in code, to Non-U folk.

Nicolson, another of Lees-Milne’s lovers, was probably his model as a diarist. As early as 1934 Nicolson wrote to Vita:

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