On the one hand, I am supremely qualified to review this book. In 1984, bored beyond endurance after graduating with one of those degrees that leaves you both over- and under-qualified for employment, I decided to take my dole money down to the Coach and Horses pub in Soho, where this magazine’s Jeffrey Bernard held court, and pay my respects to him, for I liked his prose style and his stories. I stayed there for three years or more, a postgraduate course in itself, only packing my bags at the end of 1987 when I met the woman who was to become my wife.
On the other hand, I am one of the worst people who could review this book, for I am fascinated by its subjects, and this is pretty much a time machine for me — a jolt to the memory dulled by a thousand large whiskies (cheaper than a pint at the Coach, and without making you pee so much). How can I tell whether the general reader will not be bored senseless by it?
A bore was, of course, the worst thing you could be in this company. That was true in Daniel Farson’s Soho in the Fifties, whose launch party in 1987 is described in this book, and which looms large and threatening over it, as Christopher Howse acknowledges. Its characters overlap: particularly in the cases of Francis Bacon, and the Bernard brothers, Oliver, Bruce and Jeffrey. Oliver was a gifted poet and translator; Bruce a gifted photographer and picture editor; and Jeff, the first author of this magazine’s ‘Low Life’ column — on which Keith Waterhouse based his play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell — should be a race memory of every Spectator reader to this day.
The problem is that 30 years of hard drinking doesn’t tend to make you more interesting or handsome.
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