An asymmetrical friendship

If you know your Peter Conradi from your Peter J. Conradi, you’ll also know that the former is foreign editor at the Sunday Times, while the latter is a professor emeritus at the University of Kingston and the authorised biographer of the late Iris Murdoch, of whom he was a devoted friend and disciple.

It’s Peter J. who has written this crisp memoir, and he gets the doppelgänger confusion over with early on: ‘We two Peter Conradis have never met,’ he writes, ‘but we share an optician, who once offered me his new spectacles instead of my own, so the world was out of focus.’

Family Business is partly about Conradi’s strained childhood and his Jewish antecedents, and partly about his relationship with Murdoch and her husband John Bayley, who came to stay with him and his partner Jim O’Neill in Wales for a total of eight months in 1995, just as Iris’s dementia was setting in.

Even if you don’t think you want to know about Conradi’s forebears, and aren’t particularly keen on raking over various niggling confusions and clarifications to do with his 2001 biography of Murdoch, I recommend this book, because he writes thoughtfully and well. Born on VE Day, he has clearly been thinking too hard, and worrying too much, since the age of about two. Growing up as the son of warring parents, he writes:‘I acquired a lifelong tendency to hyper-vigilance: looking for danger.’ He quotes Henry James: ‘I have the imagination of disaster.’

His father sounds dismally small-minded. Waugh-like, Conradi sums up the littleness of his father’s horizons in a few withering examples. He used to carbon-copy his letters to all his four children at boarding school, informing them of some new acquisition, such as an electric carving knife, that ‘has revolutionised our lives’.