America’s Montaigne, Gore Vidal, was born 100 years ago today. Born Eugene Luther Vidal, this Virgil of American populism entered the world on 3 October 1925 (‘Shepherds quaked’, he later said, describing his arrival in his typical, wildly egotistical way). His father, Eugene Luther Vidal – after whom he was named – was a former
Anthony Powell died on 28 March 2000, twenty-five years ago today. It is also fifty years since he completed his 12-novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time, written over a quarter of a century. How well has this unique opus worn? With a title taken from Poussin’s masterpiece of the four seasons, Dance,
Pelham Grenville (PG – or Plum) Wodehouse breathed his last on Valentine’s Day fifty years ago. As Evelyn Waugh saw it, Wodehouse inhabited a world as timeless as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland. Wodehouse himself said it was as though he was forever in his last year at school. It was, Waugh
Nancy, the first – and perhaps most famous – of the six Mitford girls, died half-a-century ago on 30 June. The lives of the Mitford sisters seem as remote today as Jane Austen’s Bennett sisters. It is almost impossible to separate the family from their fictional equivalents. The books that made them so, Nancy’s The
It is 40 years ago today since Granada’s masterly adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited first beamed into British homes. This 11-part serialisation of a book originally entitled A Household of the Faith soon gathered millions of faithful householders. The autumn of 1981 was an especially cold and wet one and it was still too soon in the Thatcher premiership for her patron
The word ‘magisterial’ consistently attaches itself to the work of David Kynaston. His eye-wateringly exhaustive four-volume history of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street established him as a historian with a confident command of a huge body of information, as bloodless and dry as the subject was. Embarking on Tales of a New Jerusalem, a
It was only in 1948 that the term WASP was coined — by a Florida folklorist, Stetson Kennedy. Yet White Anglo-Saxon Protestant never satisfactorily defined this all-but-extinct breed of American Brahmin. In his sweeping, teeming study of the WASP, Michael Knox Beran concedes that the acronym fumbles its origins. For one thing, it excludes the
Margaret Thatcher’s Lord Chancellor, Quintin Hailsham, himself half-American, once observed that the US system of government was ‘an elective monarchy with a king who rules . . . but does not reign’. The British system was ‘a republic with a hereditary life president who . . . reigns but does not rule’. And so, perhaps, it
Even ardent Mitfordians must quake at the sight of yet another biography of the sisterhood. There have been more forests felled in the name of Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah Freeman-Mitford than the Brontë sisters. Jessica alone produced two volumes of memoirs, Hons and Rebels (1960) and A Fine Old Conflict (1977); her
The lives of the Mitford Sisters have riveted, and repelled, anglophiles since the thirties. Diana Mitford once wrote, ‘I must admit “the Mitfords” would madden ME if I didn’t chance to be one’. Their hold on the public imagination can be attributed to a mixture of aristocratic eccentricity, romance, rebellion, devotion, betrayal, estrangement, tragedy, and
On 8 August 1914, four days after the declaration of war, Unity Valkyrie Mitford was born, the fifth child and fourth daughter of David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford, who admired the actress Unity Moore. Grandfather Redesdale suggested Valkyrie, after his friend Wagner’s Norse war-maidens. The fact that Unity Valkyrie had been conceived in the town of
