When we lost our mojo

Eden, the only male British prime minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the 20th century.

With Our Times, A. N. Wilson concludes the sequence of British history books he started in The Victorians, and the sentence that opens his chapter on Suez is a fine instance of his style. It has three characteristic qualities: it is irrelevantly judgmental; it drops in a nice piece of gossip (the pregnant ‘known to’, arguably, making that two pieces of gossip); and it makes you want to read on.

This is an enormously enjoyable book, a non-systematic, chatty and wilful piece of work, slaloming through familiar terrain with brio and dash rather than statistics and documents. Wilson is at one minute high-minded, at the next frivolous; at one moment wise, at the next daft; at one moment exceptionally humane, at the next merrily spiteful.