Anne Chisholm

Ninety may be the new 70, but it is also seriously old, and no picnic. In her short, sharp, disconcerting new book, Diana Athill, the renowned editor turned writer who has just reached her 90th birthday, does not try to pretend otherwise; pretending is not, and never has been, her style. Here, she contemplates her own experience of growing older, compares it with some others, and offers a few tips to the rest of us, as we, or people we love, advance towards the minefield. In many ways, she acknowledges, she has been, and still is, lucky. Born into a confident upper-middle-class family, imbued with what she now regards as ‘tribal smugness,’ she went to Oxford before the war and soon found the work she loved.

In the autumn of 1995 Jessica Mitford, the youngest of the sisters, known to one and all since childhood as Decca, sat down at her desk in Oakland, California to answer a list of questions put to her by a journalist. ‘Yes, still consider myself a communist!’ she wrote, adding, ‘So do the undertakers, I’m sure.’ At the time, she was working on a revised edition of her great work, the 1963 bestseller The American Way of Death, which exposed and mocked the grotesque practices of the funeral business; outraged undertakers had indeed tried to discredit her as a card-carrying red. She was still working on the new edition when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer less than a year later, and instantly embarked on treatment.

When the second world war began, Nicholas Mosley, the distinguished novelist son of the fascist leader Sir Oswald, who thought that Britain should not fight Germany and whose second wife, Diana Mitford, counted Goebbels and Hitler as friends, was a 16-year-old schoolboy at Eton. ‘At this time,’ he writes in his new book, in which he reconsiders and reflects on his wartime experiences, ‘I thought my father was a politician less lunatic than most.’ It was a help, he adds, that many Eton boys knew what it was like to be connected to ‘maverick politicians’. Even so, he felt self-conscious when in June 1940 his father was locked up under regulation 18b. However, ‘there were glances, but not much was said’.

There can seldom have been a better first sentence in a book by a daughter about her mother: ‘“Heil Hitler!” shouted Mummy as she pushed Daddy down the stairs at Assendon Lodge.’ Even better, the next few lines reveal that the second world war was in progress at the time, Daddy was in uniform, and the author was watching and listening from her hiding place under the said stairs. Alas, the rest of the book fails to live up to its brilliant opening. This is a pity, because Julia Camoys Stonor has a bloodcurdling tale to tell and a monstrous parent to describe; and apart from taking the lid off her family, she has a serious purpose — to indicate just how strong, in certain pre-war English upper-class circles, sympathy for Hitler and Franco could be.

Listing page content here If her name rings a bell at all, Mary Wesley, who died aged 90 in 2002, is remembered for two things: publishing the first of ten successful novels at the age of 70, and knowing a surprising amount, for a ladylike senior citizen, about sex. Even her greatest fans, though, might wonder if she rates a serious, full-length biography, and why a well-regarded writer and journalist like Patrick Marnham, who has previously produced books on Simenon, Diego Rivera and Jean Moulin, should choose her as a subject. All such carping questions can be put aside immediately. This biography is pure pleasure, a riveting, hilarious tragicomedy of manners. Mary Wesley was born Mary Farmar, and her forebears were soldiers from the Anglo-Irish gentry.

One of these anthologies (Late Youth) is small and sprightly, with a pretty, jaunty cover depicting one cheery old person cavorting on a pony and a second catching a fish. The other (The Long History) is large and substantial and uses a detail from an 18th- century self-portrait by Jean Etienne Liotard on its glossy, coffee-table- worthy jacket: the painter, gaptoothed, with straggling grey hair and a maniacal grin on his wrinked face points mockingly at his canvas with a skinny finger. The former collection is light, gossipy, upbeat, based on a well-heeled, well-connected circle of friends and relations mostly aged between 60 and 80. The latter is solemnly academic and surveys the aging process from the ancient world to the present.

According to this new biography by an earnest, academically inclined American, Peggy Guggenheim deserves to be given a respected place in the history of modern art and not dismissed as a poor little rich girl with more money than sense. In fact, Peggy Guggenheim’s reputation was well earned, not to say established early on by her own memoir, Out of This Century, published in 1949, which proudly proclaimed the haphazard nature of her activities, both artistic and sexual. By the time she was in her early twenties Peggy, born in 1898, had abandoned New York, where she was surrounded by stuffy rich Jewish relations, for Paris and the bohemian life, where she was soon surrounded by drunken spongers.

Not many collections of old reviews and lectures make worthwhile books, no matter how skilfully topped and tailed; but everything Hermione Lee, who both writes and teaches biography, has written about the state of the biographer’s art in recent years is worth re-reading. The title is off-putting, suggestive of the morgue, and there is something irritating about the subtitle as well: ‘life-writing’, apart from being clumsy, suggests that ‘biography’ is somehow old-fashioned, perhaps unlikely to lure students to a seminar.

In this enthusiastic study of the bohemian Garman family, Cressida Connolly has chosen a hard task. Group biographies are tricky to write and risk being muddling to read: there are 21 Garmans in her index. But her greatest problem has been to make her subjects, in particular Mary, Kathleen and Lorna, the three sisters at the centre of the book, signify in their own right rather than as wives, lovers and muses to a series of more talented men. They were indeed, as she writes, ‘strikingly beautiful, artistic and wild’; but that was about it. As Connolly is too honest to conceal, they were also frequently a pain in the neck.

Why, oh why, would a pleasant-looking, intelligent woman of 66, a retired English teacher with a grown-up son living in California, place an ad in the New York Review of Books announcing her age and inviting men to approach her for sex and then publish an account of the gruesome encounters that followed? A profound desire to be noticed as a writer seems a more likely answer than a need for erotic adventure; this is a book which takes the literature of exhibitionism to new heights. Ostensibly, it was an Eric Rohmer film in which a woman of fortysomething advertises for a lover on behalf of a friend that gave Jane Juska her bright idea. However, her book — which is, on the whole, well-written as well as funny and brave — offers several other clues.

In all the uproar of indignation surrounding the publication of this book, Paul Burrell’s riveting, hilarious and ultimately rather touching account of his time as a royal servant in general and butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, in particular, one curious fact has been obscured. He was, and appears to remain, so far, the most tremendous monarchist. Just as his late employer convinced herself that she could, if only she was permitted, be a shining force for good in the royal family and indeed the whole world, so Burrell believes that by breaking all the rules of loyalty and confidentiality he is actually doing his victims a service. Both of them, blinded by self-regard and publicity and short on common sense, can have had no idea of the amount of damage done.

Assuming that a biography is worth writing in the first place, it is often asserted that after 20 years or so another look at the same subject is justified. It is nearly 20 years now since Selina Hastings's subtle and perceptive account of Nancy Mitford appeared; and so even if the heart sank at the thought of revisiting Mitford country - the Hons' cupboard, the 'sewers', the shrieks, 'do tell' - it seemed only fair to approach this new book about her in a positive, hopeful spirit. After all, it was possible, if not very likely given the assiduous cultivation in recent years of the Mitford literary estate, that Laura Thompson had found some new material, or at least scanned the old material with fresh eyes. Unfortunately, the heart sinks further within the first two or three pages.