Sam Leith Sam Leith

Unsparing, frivolous candour

issue 08 January 2005

Charles Greville? you may wonder. ‘Who he? — Ed.’ Ed, decently enough, supplies us with the answer. Greville was an idler, a gambler, a political spectator, a cold fish, and a toff’s toff: a political diarist with Alan Clark’s sharpness if not his ambition, who lived from 1794-1865, and wrote from 1814-1860.

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