Raymond Carr by María Jesús Gonzalez – review

This is an unusual book: a Spanish historian writes the life of an English historian of Spain. In doing so, as the historian in question is the extraordinary Raymond Carr, still with us at 94, María Jesús González also writes about the rural West Country of his childhood, the English class system, educational opportunities in the 1930s, social mobility, Wellington College, the Gargoyle Club, Rosa Lewis at the Cavendish, four Oxford colleges, Giraldo and his orchestra, G.D.H. Cole, John Neale, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A.J. Ayer, John Sparrow, A.L. Rowse, Oswald, Diana and Nicholas Mosley, Isaiah Berlin, Margaret Thatcher and even the Queen. In academia and society — mostly high — here comes everybody.

The book has been smoothly translated from the Spanish by Nigel Griffin, and part of its interest for the English reader is that its detailed researches make one realise how peculiar so many of our institutions look to foreign eyes. The author gets a few things wrong — the title FRHS is about as exclusive as membership of the RAC — but what foreigner would not? Would an English author writing about a long-
lived Spanish academic — an enterprise hard to imagine — show the same patience and tenacity, and get so many things right?

The thoroughness of this biography has probably dismayed its subject. He would, I guess, rather regard his life as a chapter of accidents, to borrow the title from Goronwy Rees, another farouche friend and near contemporary who makes a number of appearances in these pages. Like any source of anecdote, true, embroidered or invented, he will have tired of some of the stories. The bohemian camaraderie went along — goes along — with a need to keep most people at a certain distance. As one Oxford observer put it, ‘Raymond was not so much drunk as he was the cause of drunkenness in others.’