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

I found that Jim Lees-Milne was going over to Paris on the Friday, so I decided to go with him … Jim is a charming person. He has a passion for poetry and knows masses about it. I like my friends to be well- read and well-bred. Jim is such an aristocrat in mind and culture. You would like him enormously.

Lees-Milne regarded his diary as ‘an intimate friend who mustn’t know everything’. Judging by what he told it, one speculates wildly as to what he can possibly have held back. In 1943 he writes, ‘I would like this diary to entertain two or three generations ahead when I am under the sod.’ Your wish is granted, Jim, and I cannot refrain from commenting, ‘Not the first sod you’ve been under.’

Michael Bloch has edited the diaries formidably well, and I can’t wait for the biography of Lees-Milne which he is writing; but I wonder if he has had a go at trying to trace Mr Rapton at the Family Records Centre in London. It is an unusual surname. One would be looking for a boy born between about 1923 and 1928. And just a few of Bloch’s footnotes need adjusting in the inevitable paperback. The founder of the Moravians was Count Zinzendorf, not Baron. Lady Sylvia Combe should be Lady Silvia. The note on the actress Tilly Losch ought perhaps to mention her ill-starred marriage to the millionaire Edward James; that on Alice Harding, describing her as ‘much-married Astor heiress’ might have recorded that at the time she was married to Philip Harding (a schoolfriend of John Betjeman — he was my first boss on the Times in 1963); that on Simon Harcourt-Smith could have alluded to his book The Last of Uptake, illustrated by Rex Whistler; that on Dorothy Wellesley should tell us that she was a poet; that on Hamish St Clair Erskine, that Nancy Mitford entertained a hopeless love for him; and that on Stephen Tennant (‘aesthete and idler’) needed to mention his affair with Siegfried Sassoon and maybe also his terrible drawings of French sailors. (And Tennant is missed out of the otherwise admirable index.)