Chic lit

First, I must declare an interest. I have never met Nicholas Haslam. As everyone else has, this makes me uniquely qualified to review his book without partiality. But not without interest, for Haslam is an intriguing man. I think there is more to him than meets the eye — whichever Nicholas Haslam it is that currently happens to do that. He is the easiest person to send up — but that surely is not the whole story. Then what is? — and can we read it here?

There are some useful questions to be asked about the subject of a biography/autobiography. Has this person justified their existence? On balance, have they done good in the world or harm? Have they made best use of the talents they were given? Have they added to the gaiety of nations?

Haslam has been a pretty colourful addition to the life of the last 50 years, fizzing around the world like a Catherine wheel since adolescence and not allowing himself to fizzle out yet, adding fun and joie de vivre, style and good manners, jokes and puns in a kaleidoscopic cocktail. Nothing wrong with that. But what about the rest? Is there a ‘rest’? Is there anything below this glossy, amusing, society surface that is what Haslam chooses to show us?

The clue to this sort of thing usually lies somewhere in childhood, and he is most anxious to lay a clever trail to the day he saw an encampment of raggle-taggle gypsies in the meadow near his home, and a flame lit inside him as he responded to their free, romantic, careless existence. Is this all?

The most obvious intimation of something going on beneath the fashionable surface is that Nicholas Haslam can write wonderfully well, though he doesn’t always bother.