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Our Times

When we lost our mojo

A. N. Wilson
Hutchinson, 720pp, £25,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 10th September 2008

Our Times, by A.N. Wilson

Wilson is a good enough writer to effect a joke simply in the arch arrangement of his sentences. George Brown ‘died in 1985 of cirrhosis of the liver, having become a Roman Catholic’. The Yorkshire Ripper ‘had been hitting women over the head with hammers and stabbing them repeatedly with screwdrivers throughout the Callaghan years’.

At other times, you can’t be sure what’s a joke and what isn’t. Does Wilson really attribute the botched Partition of India entirely to Mountbatten’s hurry to get back for the royal wedding? Or Lord Longford’s politics to a nasty bump on the head? Or bullying nuns and pervy priests as ‘the single greatest cause of the decline of the Roman Catholic Church in the West’? Or the disappearance of Evensong to the popularity of The Forsyte Saga?

This is part of what makes him such a riot to read. Anything that adds colour or texture to the story is embraced. Speech is rendered phonetically for fun. When Eden goes, ‘Bobbety’ Salisbury asks the Cabinet: ‘Hawold or Wab?’; we meet Ted Heath pronouncing ‘cloud’ ‘clyeowd’, and ‘sound’ ‘sayownd’; Nancy Astor is heard, with her ‘Edwardian-Virginian voice’, exclaiming, ‘What do you mean — horrifyin’?’

Wilson’s turns of phrase are sharp, often puncturingly and personally so. Eric Hobsbawn is a ‘malign intellectual eccentric’. Oswald Mosley is ‘natural flypaper for the crackpots’. Sylvia Plath’s death is ‘as if Lucille Ball had suddenly been cast as Medea’. F. R. Leavis is ‘the closest thing modern Cambridge produced to Savonarola’. De Gaulle ‘could not quite forgive Britain for its personal kindness’. George Melly is ‘depressing not because he was immoral but because he was second-rate (his particular area of non-expertise being jazz)’. Mary Whitehouse is ‘a bustling, busy woman whose grin was rendered mirthless by too large false teeth’. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is ‘a work of genius with a number of profoundly ludicrous pages’. Michael Portillo is a ‘blubber-lipped bisexual with rigorously combed-back hair’. In addition to his professional life (he ‘combined the roles of fashionable QC with that of being a second-rate writer’), John Mortimer’s ‘pudgy expression and always dribbling lips’ are noted. As are Tony Blair’s ‘shifty and mad’ eyes and Gordon Brown’s ‘tongue disconcertingly too large for his mouth’. Connie Booth in Fawlty Towers, by contrast, is ‘poised and beautiful ... a meltingly beautiful blonde’ and Polish immigrants are commended on their ‘eager, intelligent faces’.