But how much else is true? Was there really a gangster of a French colony in North Africa whom he saved from the guillotine, and who offered him the complete Roman mosaic which formed the floor of his cellar? And the wife of a préfet who, during a drunken lunch, politely offered to show a British sergeant her private parts? ‘Veux-tu voir ma belle craquette?’ You may find yourself humming that.

Norman Lewis was aware of his weakness for embroidery (‘I’m not a liar, countrymen, but my imagination sometimes takes control. Let it go a few years, and I’m never sure myself what happened’). John Hatt once came on him gloomily watching as the money poured out from the fruit machine he had been playing. ‘Oh dear, when I get home they’re going to say, “Norman, you’re lying again.” ’ He may have inherited this from his roots, for in the old Wales each village had what the writer D. J. Williams called its own Transparent Liar, a man who reigned in pubs and farmhouse kitchens, the fun being derived from the fact that his audience knew, and he knew they knew, that he was lying.

But Norman Lewis was also the man who first alerted the world to the destruction of its rain forests, and also to the treatment of the people who lived in them. So there is inevitably a tension, which Julian Evans explores in his biography, only he does so like this:

Writing of course deepens the moveable theme of memory — a written-down memory is not exactly the same as what was remembered, and memories change and reorder themselves over time (not to mention what was written down about them ) — and presumably it did not occur to Norman what we now know to be neurologically true about memory, that writing things down, taking notes, is also a form of not remembering. The brain surrenders memories remembered by the hand; so the act of writing offers a counterpoint to memory as well as an account of it.

This is a long and fascinating book. Unfortunately at times it can seem even longer. 

AN APOLOGY
In our issue of 22 March, we published a review by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne of Stephen Robinson’s biography of Lord Deedes. The review was edited, against Sir Peregrine’s wishes, leaving the reader with the incorrect impression that Lord Deedes had called his colleagues a ‘stinking mob’. We carried a letter by Stephen Robinson on 29 March making clear that, in fact, Lord Deedes was referring specifically to the management of the company when he used this expression. We would like to apologise further to Sir Peregrine for the error.

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