Age cannot wither her

There’s something reassuring about 98-year-old Diana Athill. She’s stately and well-ordered, like the gardens at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, her grandparents’ Georgian house where she spent long periods of her childhood. Yes, she really is of that class, though she doesn’t trumpet it (she was presented at court in the brief reign of King Edward VIII) and, as is well known, she is of more than a certain age — born in 1917, towards the end of the first world war but, in social terms, a throwback to the Edwardian era, and half a decade before the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land signalled the arrival of Modernism.

One of the ten essays in this delightful collection is about her attitude to clothes. Her favourite garments remain the old-fashioned ball gowns — often velvet and taffeta creations by her self-taught mother — which she, as a young woman with a 22-inch waist and a passion for Vogue, wore to dances. As she notes, this was in the ‘pre-sexy’ days, when desirability was associated with ‘beauty’, ‘prettiness’ and ‘charm’, rather than provocativeness. She recalls, with a hint of disapproval, first hearing the word ‘sexy’ applied to an item of beachwear. It sounded transatlantic and rather vulgar.

Come the late Sixties, she wore sensible maxi dresses rather than flirtatious minis (albeit she was by then over 50, so probably already too old for revealing shows of thigh). I suspect, however, that she was always a handsome woman rather than a vamp.

Yet she has a habit of flouting convention. It’s not the subject of this book but, after a protracted affair with an older man starting when she was 15, she found she enjoyed sex and later, as she developed her successful career as a publisher, she lived with, but never married, a succession of men.