Diary – 13 August 2015

Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day, announcing the unthinkable — the surrender of the great imperial power to the secular, gas-guzzling, unheeding West — seemed like a profanity. So much came to an end with that surrender that it is not possible to celebrate it, particularly since the method chosen to defeat Japan was nuclear-fuelled genocide, not once — which would have been unforgiveable enough — but twice. Surely the Japanese who survived that monstrous pair of bombings, both of which were without any military or moral justification, were staring at what motivated Guy Crouchback — in Waugh’s trilogy — to take up arms in the first place: ‘The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful. It was the Modern Age in Arms.’

My wife remarked the other day that the Hotel Russell, in Russell Square, had made a mistake some years ago in closing the Virginia Woolf Burger Bar. They had not foreseen that the tiresome Bloomsbury Group, hitherto the enthusiasm of a few cognoscenti and some students reading English at university, was about to become ‘box office’. The hotel ought to consider reopening the burger bar, with perhaps a Duncan Grant sauna or an E.M. Forster curry night. I once lived next door to Barbara Strachey — daughter of Lytton’s brother, the cryptographer Oliver, and of his wife Ray Costello, a painter, who wrote a good history of feminism called The Cause. These liberal-minded parents, filled with all the Bloomsbury/G.E. Moore notions, let their nippers read any book on their groaning shelves, from Marie Stopes to D.H. Lawrence. One day, Barbara’s little brother came into the dining room waving a moth-eaten volume and asked with the piping ten-year-old confidence of one who’d found a recondite book: ‘It’s called Holly Bibble — any good?’

The incorrigible human tendency to disobey wise counsels is frightening but also endearing.