Gerard Noel

The publisher Gerard Noel pays tribute to his friend and author who died last week at the age of 79 One Friday evening in the early 1980s two brand-new, bright red cars roared up to my house in Gloucestershire. The drivers were Laura and Anthony Blond, my guests for a bank holiday weekend, who had clearly just had a rush of blood to the head in the showroom of their local Citroen dealer. ‘Don’t worry,’ I cooed as they reached the front door, ‘It’s only me here, so we are going to have a nice quiet weekend.’ ‘I hate it when people say that,’ snarled Anthony, as he pushed past me into the sitting room and started frantically to thumb his way through the local telephone directory in search of fresh blood.

The first world war seemed like a good idea at the time. Cheering crowds thronged deliriously through the capitals of Europe as war was declared. In England the prospect of being paid to kill foreigners started a stampede to join up. Within five weeks almost 480,000 men had volunteered, many lying about their age. An exception was Bert Brocklesby, a charismatic young Methodist in South Yorkshire who wrote on the first day of the war: ‘However many might volunteer yet I would not … God had not put me on earth to go destroying his own children.’ Brocklesby was one of the 35 ‘absolutists’ who were prepared to die rather than co-operate in any way with the war.

Born in 1947, Jeremy Norman belongs to the first generation of homosexual Englishmen able to express their sexuality openly and without fear of prosecution, courtesy of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. As his entertaining memoir attests, Norman has certainly made the most of his freedom. Not only has his life been ‘a frenzied dance and feast of pleasure’ but, as an astute businessman, he has plundered the pink pound in a succession of enterprises including Heaven, the world’s most famous gay nightclub. And, perhaps most remarkably of all, he has lived to tell the tale. The 1967 Act did not change the world overnight. In Norman’s view, it took another 20 years for homosexuality to become socially acceptable as well as legal.

William Russell was a young American who worked as a clerk in the US embassy in Berlin at the time of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. When Berlin Embassy, his account of those epic times appeared in 1941, it was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Little is known of what became of Russell after his return to America in 1940 and his book has been out of print for over 40 years. But thanks to the enterprise of the London-based publishers Elliott & Thompson, we can once again hear the cool, almost laconic, voice of the fun- loving 24-year-old as he calmly elucidates the horror and farce of an era now shrouded by a haze of revisionist history and political correctness.

This highly readable selection of obituaries is based on the original more general collections of Hugh Massingberd. His object was to celebrate life rather than death; and indeed the persons here described, though from a specialised category, come vividly alive in the capable hands of Canon Trevor Beeson. The period covered is the quarter century from 1987 to 2002. Of the 89 entries, 86 are of men, mostly, but not all, Anglican. Highlighted here are facts and events not, in general, mentioned in the actual obituaries, whose dates are given in brackets. The Rev.

This is one of the most devastating but, at the same time, restrained and balanced indictments, among the many that have appeared, of the conduct of the Roman Catholic Church in the face of the Holocaust. It is restrained in that it avoids extreme positions, let alone emotive language, even disagreeing with the expression 'Hitler's Pope' as an apt description of Pius XII; but it is devastating in the unremitting detail, including some new revelations, with which it makes its clinically incisive approach to this painful subject. The book breaks important new ground in two directions.