Diary – 14 October 2006

‘History in the making can be most exhausting.’ When I first read these words — by Noël Coward — I immediately assumed they applied to the writing of it. Having just finished a long book about the loves of Louis XIV, I thought I knew all about that exhaustion. So much for solipsism. Noël Coward was actually recording in his diary for 3 September 1945 his feelings at the end of a long war with ‘the world in physical and spiritual chaos’. I read the entry in a wonderful book, The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor, with multiple extracts for every day of the year — no bathroom is complete without it. The most sympathetic entry comes from Lady Cynthia Asquith for 14 October 1915. She heard that there were Zeppelins about but experienced ‘not the faintest tremor. I longed and longed for more to happen …My only words were “something for my diary”.’ My father Frank Longford showed a similar diary-comes-first spirit in the summer of 1981 over the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. My mother, a great admirer of the prince, prayed not to be invited on the grounds of infirmity. My father, not quite such an admirer, prayed that they would be asked because he was keeping a diary for publication. (In the end my mother’s prayers won out.)

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In the long term, possessiveness is probably the true mark of the historical biographer. Nearly 40 years after my Mary Queen of Scots was published I still felt total amazement that the respected Tudor historian John Guy had chosen to write about my Mary. His book was extremely well reviewed; all the same, it took me two years to read it.