Madcap antics: The Pentecost Papers, by Ferdinand Mount, reviewed
Ferdinand Mount has had an illustrious career, including posts as head of the No. 10 policy unit under Margaret Thatcher, literary and political editor of The Spectator and editor of the TLS. He is a prolific author to boot, with 29 fiction and non-fiction books under his belt. His latest novel, The Pentecost Papers, is an ‘ill-starred odyssey through an incurably slippery world’, he writes, ‘recorded by several hands – most of them unsteady’. Our first narrator is Dickie Pentecost, a diplomatic correspondent (‘an anachronism,’ he admits, ‘like still keeping a hat-stand in the hall’). Dickie will be familiar to readers of Making Nice (2021), a satire of spin dedicated
