John Julius-Norwich

The stranger on the train

Sixty years on, <em>John Julius Norwich</em> begins to wonder who his travelling companion through France might have been, whose anecdote about the Tolstoys he has been re-telling all his life

issue 22 September 2012

What a pleasure it was to be reminded in a ‘Life and Letters’ column by Allan Massie (28 July) of Desmond MacCarthy. He was an old friend of my parents’ and, in the immediate postwar years, a fairly frequent visitor to their house in Chantilly, outside Paris. One Friday afternoon — it must I think have been 1950 or 1951 — we were sitting opposite each other as the train rattled through Normandy.

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