Highbrows and eyebrows

Juliet Nicolson is a member of a literary dynasty second in productivity only to the Pakenhams. She is herself the author of two distinguished volumes of social history describing Britain immediately before and immediately after the first world war. This is her first novel.

The danger of letting a social historian write novels is that the social history is likely to lie rather heavily upon the narrative. Nicolson is not guiltless in this respect. The characters in her novel are strikingly well connected. Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Vanessa Bell, Lord Reith, all have walk-on parts. Almost the only two literary figures of any social consequence who do not appear, indeed, are the author’s grandparents: Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.

We witness the Jarrow March and the burning of the Crystal Palace. We visit the Queen Mary before its inaugural sailing and read Gone With the Wind. We experience the delights of a Bloody Mary — ‘a concoction that had arrived two years earlier on the menu of the St Regis Hotel in New York’ — and visit the studio of Eric Ravilious to inspect the souvenir mugs he has designed for the coronation.

We are present when the ‘politics don, Frank Pakenham’, is beaten up by Mosley’s thugs, and even have the pleasure of being introduced to Pakenham’s ‘three-year-old daughter, adorable and curly-haired and innocent’ (Lady Antonia Fraser also features among those whom the author thanks in her acknowledgements, so she can claim double billing). It is all good fun, but there is perhaps too much of it.

That complaint over, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining book. Nicolson writes extremely well, she has a keen eye for detail and she has mastered her sources with impressive efficiency.