Topics which were once taboo have long since ceased to be: the word ‘homosexuality’ doesn’t appear in the essay on the frock-maker Sir Hardy Amies, but we learn in passing that he had a male ‘partner’. Then, in a nicely written essay on Andrew, the last Duke of Devonshire, Philip Ziegler tells us that ‘his private life, as he was the first to admit, was not irreproachable, but whatever he did was done with style and generosity,’ which is surely the sort of thing one says at a memorial service, to affectionate knowing chuckles. In the ODNB, whatever is alluded to should either be spelled out, or not mentioned at all.
Altogether more rum is a passage in the essay on Elizabeth Longford by Paul Johnson, who also does her husband Frank, and needless to say does them both very well. Except that — well, he mentions the great sorrow of the Longfords’ lives, the death in a motor accident in 1969 of their delicious young daughter Catherine. Shortly before she was killed she had landed her first newspaper job, and was talking about it to ‘an old family friend’. He admonished her: ‘Catherine, last week I saw you walking down Fleet Street with a coureur des dames much senior to you. Are you aware that he has had affairs with at least two of your sisters?’ ‘Yes I am’, she said fiercely, ‘but I’ve got him now!’ (private information).
Crikey! We can presumably work out who the friend was — but is this a reference book, or Nigel Dempster (who will, I trust, be in the next volume)?
Several historians departed in this less-than-lustrum, and the excellent Richard Davenport-Hines does justice to Hugh Trevor-Roper and his qualities as an essayist. There are two members of the famous or notorious Communist Historians Group of 60 years ago. Robin Briggs dismisses the ‘innuendo’ that Christopher Hill had been a Soviet mole, while lauding this ‘great historian’ in a way that Blair Worden, let’s say, might not have done. And although E. J. Hobsbawm no doubt tries to write with objectivity about his old comrade Rodney Hilton (certainly a better historian than Hill), he indulges in a little vicarious self-pity when he says that Hilton ‘was aware, and resented the fact, that his membership of the Communist Party stood in the way of his career prospects’. At least that’s better than actual errors of fact: Henry Wallace was not the Democratic candidate at the 1948 American presidential election (p. 660).
Having solemnly regretted the intrusion of personal affection into this grand and splendid work, I should add that there are touches which only some degree of intimacy could have provided, such as Lord Hailsham’s tendency to recite ‘long, if not always apposite, passages of Greek verse’. And the most poignant thing about the book for this reviewer is its intimation of mortality: the essays on my own close contemporaries. The publisher Frances Lincoln died at 55, the political historian Ben Pimlott at 58, the medievalist Patrick Wormald at 57. We were at Oxford in the late 1960s; they were all unusually gifted; they should have died hereafter.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.