Daring? No. Well written? Yes

This has all the appearance of a book invented by a publisher. Two years ago W. Sydney Robinson published an excellent biography of the Victorian newspaperman W.T. Stead. How best to follow this? No attractive subject for another full-scale biography suggested itself. Why not therefore fill in time by writing long essays on four worthies from the generation that followed Stead? And so we have: ‘A Daring Reassessment of Four Twentieth Century Eccentrics: Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Dean Inge, Lord Reith and Sir Arthur Bryant.’ The only trouble is that the reassessment is not particularly daring and the characters hardly at all eccentric.

Joynson-Hicks — ‘Jix’ as he was usually referred to, and Lord Brentford as he eventually became — was bizarre rather than eccentric. All Robinson’s heroes were conservative with a small ‘c’ and usually with a large ‘C’ as well, but Jix was so far to the right that Robinson feels it necessary to protest that he would ‘likely have found Nazism as abhorrent and unchristian as he found Communism’. Jix defended Reginald Dyer’s handling of affairs at Amritsar, rejected partition in Ireland, violently opposed female suffrage and almost single-handedly defeated the move to introduce a revised Prayer Book. Even the most timorous steps towards reform were dismissed as being certainly socialistic, probably communist. D.H. Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley’s Lover Jix did his best to suppress, denounced him as

one of the grey elderly ones belonging to the last century, the eunuch century, the century of the mealy-mouthed lie, the century that has tried to destroy humanity, the 19th century.

‘Mealy-mouthed’ is not a charge that could be brought against Robinson’s next subject, William Inge, Dean of St Paul’s, the ‘gloomy Dean’. Unlike Lawrence, Inge thought that the 19th century was ‘the most wonderful century in human history’ and denounced post-1918 England as ‘a chaos of factories and mean streets, reeking of smoke, millionaires, and paupers’.