Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Trying to Please

A long and happy life

John Julius Norwich
Dovecot Press, 384pp, £20,

Jason Goodwin

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Jason Goowin reviews the memoirs of John Julius Norwich

For the next three years Diana dispensed scotch and sympathy to needy Parisians, while her husband worked at keeping de Gaulle away from Winston. JJ writes compellingly about the glamour and edginess of those years, when Parisian society was in turmoil; he even witnessed Maurice Chevalier, who had performed in Paris all through the Occupation, rehabilitate himself onstage in a single performance. It was an Ensa production of The Merry Widow, and Chevalier’s turn was warily slotted into the cabaret scene. The audience received him doubtfully and yet, after a few songs, a wave of the boater, a twinkle in the eye, they wouldn’t let him go; the encores lasted 40 minutes. The effect was not lost on the young Cooper: Byzantine emperors, like the early doges, were frequently charismatic, too.

Cooper did not ‘distinguish himself’ at Eton or Oxford, but then every house he ever visited, or lived in, had eye-wateringly distinguished people falling out of the doors. FDR refused him an autograph (‘Office won’t allow me’) but he did cadge a piece of pie off de Gaulle, who gave it to him, surprised, noting that it was covered in his cigar ash. Over lunch at No. 10 he gave Churchill a frank account of Eton life that drew the great man’s scowl. In his teens the Berlin he knew was Isaiah. Merle Oberon fixed up his first marriage.

Having listened to Hilaire Belloc, he joined the FO out of Oxford with a repertoire of songs, both in French and English, which he could sing to the guitar; the consummate showman Burl Ives was a favourite. That talent, and slivovitz, saw him through three years in Belgrade, the grimmest capital of Eastern Europe. Beirut was his eventual reward, from where, like that luminous grapefruit, his own career began its climb into the eastern sky.

Since then in print, on television and on tour, threading his audience through the bazaars and palaces of the Levant, he has been something of a national cicerone. Here he writes delicately of his marriages and affairs, from which he has emerged with three interesting children and a house in Little Venice where he confidently intends to live for the remainder of his days.

How good if the young were to read this book. After all, Lord Norwich, author of multi-volume works on Venice and the Byzantines, television presenter and music buff, is a faintly fearsome figure. Refreshing to discover from these engrossing memoirs that his grandfather was a bottom doctor, that the title came almost by accident, and that he is the happy possessor of two tattoos, one on each arm.

Jason Goodwin’s latest novel, The Bellini Card, is published by Faber at £12.99.