A painless lesson in political history

This book is not a history, explains Ruth Winstone, who has edited this collection of excerpts from diaries published between 1921 and 2011. It is, she says, ‘an impressionist view of politically changing times’. It is, indeed, a patchwork quilt of a book, no two pieces precisely meshing with each other yet providing in total a remarkably clear and coherent portrait of 90 stressful years.

It is ‘a political diary’, but Winstone admits that the definition of ‘political’ became more and more elastic as the book took shape. It is all the better for it. Some of the most enjoyable passages have only a tenuous link with the world of public affairs but it would have been sad to lose Virginia Woolf on Ulysses — ‘an illiterate under-bred book’ she thought it, which left her ‘puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’.

Or Noel Coward dismissing Waiting for Godot as

pretentious gibberish. It is nothing but phoney surrealism. It has no form, no basic philosophy and absolutely no lucidity.

Or Evelyn Waugh at a party

where we found some very odd painters quite drunk and rather naked. The party was given in honour of a negro who is acting in a play called Emperor Jones but he had a fit in his dressing-room.

The majority of the entries, however, relate to the political state of the nation. Most of the diarists are insiders — powerful figures like Dalton, Macmillan or Gaitskell, or the people who keep the machinery of government running like Jock Colville, Cadogan or Bernard Donoghue.

Inevitably, such people are better informed than the outsiders, but it is often the outsiders who provide the most interesting comments. Nella Last, the housewife who made so notable a contribution to the records of Mass Observation, offers shrewd common sense, while Beatrice Webb (not that she would have considered herself an outsider) provokes endless wonder that a woman of such intelligence should have been so gullible when it came to Communism:

The salient and distinctive feature of Soviet Russia [ she wrote in 1922] is the establishment of a Spiritual Power over and above the ostensible government.